qtns wrote: "Because for 100% to have something, it has to arrive at all first, even if it arrives at different times to different people?"

Dissy wrote: "It can easily be distributed to everyone just as everything is produced."

We have just produced the first mobile phone! Dissident, here is your one seven-billionth of a mobile phone!

Exactly how useful is the first seven-billionth of a mobile phone?

Besides which, you have severely underestimated the cost of distribution. Distribution is an industry in itself, and requires huge inputs. It isn't free. This is why a gallon of water is more valuable in the middle of the Sahara than it is in the middle of Lake Superior.

"A "good start" usually amounts to remaining in the class you were born in, because it's not possible to purchase the huge, massively expensive factories to compete with the capitalists."

Almost no one can afford a big factory on their own - this is why corporations and stocks were created. Many of the working class people I know own stock, whether directly or indirectly through mutual funds.

"social democracy was formed to save capitalism by making it less exploitative and rein in the worst of its excesses on the working class and the environment"

Social democracy may have been formed to save capitalism, but not by making it less exploitative or reining in its excesses - because we know that all of us would be much wealthier and much better off if capitalism had been less impeded in its growth. Insomuch as social democracy has saved capitalism, it has been much the same way that payments to the Barbary pirates saved fleets - tribute to prevent the robbers from destroying everything. In the case of social democracy, the pirates may be less aware of what they are doing than the Barbary pirates were (though in communities where piracy is the norm, it is normal for the people there to think nothing ill of their local industry) - but the mechanisms are much the same: they want a share, or they will destroy the wealth created by others.




Baldur