Capitalism has a flaw – Truth

What am I saying? Well, I am not a historian, nor have I gone back to study, but I bring forward what I have seen, heard, learned, and witnessed over my several decades here in the United Sates.

 
 

We banned slavery, meaning we had the power to force individuals to work for others without their consent. But we replaced it with “Legal Slavery” during the industrial revolution. Instead of forcing people to work for others, where they got room and board, we then offered people the ability to work for a pay that simply would not even do the former. Thus, all members of the family had to work to pay the bills and purchase food. It was not until the labor movement; businesses were forced to limit the number of hours individuals could work per day/per hour. The minimum age individuals had to be in order to be employed. The labor movement also got the installation of the minimum wage.

 
 

Is not that weird that Capitalism had to have the government intervene to supply their employees with enough pay to be considered living wages.

 
 

Minimum wage legislation emerged at the end of the nineteenth century from the desire to end sweated labor which had developed in the wake of industrialization.[22] Sweatshops employed large numbers of women and young workers, paying them what were considered nonliving wages that did not allow workers to afford the necessaries of life. From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States>

 
 

Maybe the word lying or cheating are too strong on the offset, but when you get the line between them, non-truth is a lie or cheating.

 
 

Capitalism, most folks believe within the marketplace is: Producing the best product for the best price and charging a fair price, is capitalism. To the greater regard, even today this is true, but very diluted.

 
 

Have you watched the old Western movies? They often have the traveling salesperson selling the “snake oil”, the liquid that cures everything. This was capitalism, they could say whatever they wanted, it was up to the buyer, the customer to determine the truth.

 
 

I have been watching product comparisons a lot lately. The comparisons were based on price, are the more expensive ones worth the extra money. More often, to the point of every time, cheaper versions of the same tool, oil, machine, outperform the more expensive ones. In addition, most, almost to the point of every time, the claims these companies make on the box about the performance of the item does not match the actual performance. Meaning, they fall short, most of the time, truly short of their claims. Kinda like the snake salesperson from our western days.

 
 

For the most part, these companies are allowed to get away with “claims”, they claim and we the customer, do not: Firstly, know the difference, we want a tool, we buy one that we have some sort of trust it will do the job and that is it. If it performs adequately, most of us do not challenge the claims. It said it would cut wood, it cut wood, then we are done.

 
 

My point is, Capitalism does allow us to enter the marketplace and sell our goods, services, expertise, visions, theology, ideas to anyone willing to purchase or has the need, but it is a buyer beware world.

 
 

The snake oil salesperson has become the company or the individual who can “convince” others of their sincerity. The more in-depth support of the snake oil salesperson is when let us say, a business owner in the town had supported the snake oil salesperson, thus the business owner maybe now has a personal stake in the snake oil salesman success.

 
 

There are such as I stated, videos that can challenge certain truths, such as a product performance can be challenged, it can be proved or not. However, more than an individual video or source, and against say a national media, against the company with tremendous media power, the larger voice, the louder voice can eventually win for the most part.

 
 

Thus, for those that do not know, do not have access, just need a tool, go into a store and pick a tool on two fundamentals. What is the best tool for the amount of money I am willing to spend? However, let us say you want to buy the best tool and there are five of them. You have $200.00 and the $200.00 claims that it outperforms all other tools. So, you buy it, but you do not know if the $50.00 tool outperforms the $200.00 . l.

 
 

The idea of truth, I believe, started with products, maybe our services, but it narrows down to truth. I think we all have heard about “Truth in Advertising;” however, claims are apparently much different. Claims are about truth; thus, we must conclude the manufacturer of products which clearly do not match their claims, are incredibly ignorant, or implicit. Even if a marketing company produced these claims independently of the manufacture, the manufacture, one might believe is they, the manufacture has a duty to right the truth. But they do not.

 
 

As much as we believe in Capitalism, and truth is we have a great society a great country from it, but it is not pure capitalisms that made our country. It was the balance between forces that allowed us to grow into the country we have become. In our brief history, compared to other countries, we went from a group of people seeking freedom from tyrannical power to the most powerful country in the world.

 
 

Even though we still have a challenge between claims and truth, on a product level, they have become so good overall, that for the most part, regardless of the product you buy, it will be a descent one. However, truth of ideology, truth of and claims on the political level, have reached heights which I believe we cannot recover from. The reason being, is so many people have so much invested, not just the political leaders, but there are business and even countries that have risk involved, however; the worst part, is a significant percentage of our country have decided to be vested in a particular ideology regardless of facts.

 
 

We started the greatness of our country by kicking out the Indigenous people, we then told everyone they can reach the American Dream, we then cheated them out of wages and dignity. We offer the American Dream as the middle class; we measure the American Dream by the size of the middle class – because the middle class is the largest group of people with the most overall purchasing power. Something that keeps our country engine running strong.

 
 

So, what is happening in our political culture is no different than what we have been doing since the beginning. We continue to make claims that are only true on whom they can convince these claims are true. The worst part though, is one group is wanting their voice to be the only voice and it seems as though in order to for this to happen, they are denouncing without ethics anyone/group voices an opinion or displays facts which are counter to their ideology.

 
 

This is like Honda trying to denounce Toyota because they may do a comparison of two models and state, based on our facts, the Honda does not perform as claimed. Or it is like Honda trying to shut down YouTuber’s that do the same thing, trying to silence any voice that does not support their narrative.

 
 

Capitalism works as long as we are honest, each of us. Like two teams competing, without referees, who is to say when a rule or a play or an action is, ok? Referees, like the government, were created to be independent spectators of the game in order to make sure rules were enforced evenly and accurately. However, the challenge today is the referees of our nation, our government, has become a member of one of the teams.

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