This was posted on Facebook by an old friend of mine, who's become a fundie Paulbot since we last met.
ARGH. *rage mode!* Nazi Germany was
not. bloody. socialist! The Nazi Party was primarily a party of the petty-bourgeois class (as opposed to the working class), and in power it was a pretty capitalist system, it didn't majorly change the economic layout. They abolished the bloody union attached to the party for one.
Free-market capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in the history of man. The problem with our country today is we no longer have free-market capitalism.
If you think America is not free market capitalist, you need walloping. Honestly. (Though of course what is or isn't a free market is a political definition rather than an objective one - it's more like a scale with "more free market" at one end and "less free market" at another).
While it's true that capitalism has created the wealth that makes us able to get rid of poverty, left to its own devices it doesn't
exactly do this. I mean, if the government legislates that people who are unemployed should get a basic payout to prevent them from starving, that is not caused by capitalism
per se (even if capitalism is a necessary condition for it) it's caused by the government offsetting the worst of the system.
I mean there wasn't any poverty in laissez-faire nineteenth century England![/sarcasm]