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Sci
Lv 4
Sci asked in Politics & GovernmentGovernment · 10 years ago

Why are liberals and the protesters against capitalism?

This is a video of Phil Donahue interviewing Milton Friedman thirty years ago.

The audience is notably silent.

Read the comment from Jeffery Reinberg - interesting

Update 2:

Mark - your comments don't compute so this leads me to think that you might have swept the floors in the Wall Street companies - did you REALLY watch and listen to the video?

7 Answers

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  • 10 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Your first answer shows absolute ignorance. Enron employees engaged in criminal acts. Some are in jail.

    Liberals don't like free enterprise because they want government control of everything. Fleabaggers don't know what they want.

  • mark
    Lv 7
    10 years ago

    We love capitalism. We hate exploitation.

    In the case of the OWS protesters, America has a valid beef. I used to work on wall street for 20 years (I left 12 years ago). Unlike virtually any other business, wall street has NO SKIN IN THE GAME. They make money if you make money. They make money if you lose money. Imagine a business that makes toasters that broke after the 1st use. That business would be history in a week.

    Furthermore, they have caused problems throughout the economy. They created risky investments in the housing market that allowed them to reduce their own risk while encouraging sales of homes to underqualified people. Yes, those underqualfied people are to blame as well but the predatory lending practices were almost criminal. And, when these risky investments collapsed, they looked to us for a bailout right before they paid out billions of PERFORMANCE bonuses to its execs and fund managers.

    And, the republicans don't want regulation. They are either stupid or criminals.

    -----edit-----

    No, didn't watch the video. Just responding to the ridiculous question wording. And, I was an executive consultant to the CIO assisting with software selection and implementation

  • Ron
    Lv 6
    10 years ago

    Because they've been trained to be. Capitalism has increased the standard of living in every society where it's ever been applied. (You think a communist society would have produced all those iPods they're listening to down at OWS?) It's only when government tries to manipulate capitalism, rather than allowing it to self-correct, that the system fails.

    For example, General Motors should have been allowed to go under decades ago, but the government keeps propping it up for short-term political gain. Like in any eco-system, when a species can no longer survive, it dies out and is replaced by something evolutionarily new. If people stick their hands in, artificially keeping them alive and introducing new species that didn't belong there in the first place, they screw up the eco-system forever. Capitalism's no different.

    This doesn't mean that you don't keep a watch on corruption, of course you do. You have to protect the environment, and you have to protect workers' rights. It doesn't mean to take laissez-faire to the extreme. But many of the OWS crowd will portray it that way, which is obviously a straw-man argument if ever there was one.

  • 10 years ago

    Different point of views? The majority of liberals tend to dislike capitalism.

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  • Capitalism gets out of hand regularly. Ever hear of ENRON?

  • Anonymous
    10 years ago

    It has never provided enough jobs for just the people that want to work.

  • 10 years ago

    there are no bailouts in capitalism...nor are there giant bonuses for failure

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