A Sucker's Bet

A friend recently posted this image to his Facebook page and thereby gave me a reason to create today's blog post.

If Margaret Thatcher’s comment is accurate regarding socialism, it is also accurate regarding of the problem with capitalism, except that with capitalism you don't eventually run out of other people's money, “you” eventually run out of suckers.

Strict capitalism is, at its core, a Ponzi scheme in which the value inherent in the skills and labor of a group of people is converted into currency and deposited into the bank accounts of the capitalists with successive groups of people becoming the unwitting investors (AKA suckers) in the scheme.

Capitalists use people who are destitute to do the real work in an economy. They bamboozle those people into believing they are being “given” a job when they are actually entering into a contract where their valuable skills and labor are being traded for wages.

The scheme begins to unravel when the workers come to realize that they don’t have to settle for a “take it or leave it” wage and attempt to organize as a bargaining unit (union).

The response of the strict capitalist is to resist and break the union; and, if that does not work, to simply replace those workers with another group of destitute people. This was previously called "hiring scabs." That term has now been replaced by the modern euphemism known as "outsourcing."

Both capitalism and socialism are viable economic systems when tempered by justice and fair play within a system of government designed to benefit the general population. Both become oppressive when there are no regulations to curb the zealotry and greed of those running the economic system or when those economic systems are believed to be inseparable from the system of government and thereby achieve the status of holy writ, exempt from examination, evaluation, and modification by the population.

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Ponzi scheme |ˈpänzē|nouna form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.ORIGIN named after Charles Ponzi (died 1949), who carried out such a fraud (1919–20).