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This is what Germans really think about capitalism
TheLocal.de ^ | 15 August 2017 15:26 CEST+02:00 | Jörg Luyken

Posted on 08/15/2017 1:15:14 PM PDT by Olog-hai

Despite the turbulence of the Weimar years, Germany has followed a steady capitalist economic model since the end of the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean people like the idea, a new study shows.

Contrary to the US, where belief in capitalism is as entrenched as hot dogs and baseball, Germany has always had a more complicated relationship to the philosophy of competitive markets. This is, after all, the country that gave us the founding communist thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

And a study published by Statista and YouGov on Tuesday shows that only 16 percent of Germans believe capitalism to be something that is on the whole positive. At the same time, 27 percent of Germans have an ambivalent attitude to the economic model, while 52 percent see it as a bad thing.

Six in every ten respondents said that they believed that capitalism is a system whereby the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer. Similarly, 41 percent said that capitalism involved the exploitation of the poor. Twenty-one percent of respondents also believed that unfair competition was intrinsic to capitalism. …

(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.de ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Foreign Affairs; Germany
KEYWORDS: anticapitalism; brexit; cityoflondon; eurozone; eussr; fifthreich; france; germany; robinhoodtax; socialmarketeconomy; tobintax; unitedkingdom
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To: Rome2000

If I ever get one shot with a time machine, I’m going after Marx, not Hitler.

Hitler is a self-destructive dead-end. Marx is undying mind poison.


21 posted on 08/15/2017 2:45:04 PM PDT by Rinnwald
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To: fruser1
Maybe you haven’t been to the US lately. The fact that Sanders was even a viable candidate in the last election tells all.

Exactly. Virtually all Democrats higher than the local level are socialists. And I'm not too sure about the "virtually" part.

22 posted on 08/15/2017 2:50:52 PM PDT by libertylover (In 2016 small-town America got tired of being governed by people who don't know a boy from a girl.)
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To: JeanLM
Theirs is more socialistic than ours, but that is because they started many of the welfare programs that exist. They have a history of living regulated lives going back to the middle ages. They accept that as a fact of life.

However when presented with entrepreneurial opportunity they jump at it.

Sort of like our "blue states"? Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, etc.

23 posted on 08/15/2017 3:05:36 PM PDT by x
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To: Olog-hai

The “social democrats” inherited Hitler’s “nationalist” socialism, with its tidy government-corporate relationships and its welfare state, rejecting only Hitler’s racism and imperialism. It is no surprise that attitudes today about capitalism in Germany are ambivalent at best or negative at worst.


24 posted on 08/15/2017 3:07:24 PM PDT by Wuli
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To: Buckeye McFrog

It’s a combination of many factors, of course. Handing off de-Nazification to Adenauer after a mere two years, the UN having a charter identical to the USSR’s constitution, the USA’s own turn left in a cultural sense after the end of WWII; those would be the biggest factors.


25 posted on 08/15/2017 3:54:45 PM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: ALongRoadAhead

When they declare war on you, you do kinda have to go over there and stop them. The “saving” bit was under the control of the US left, which is why things are turning out disastrous.


26 posted on 08/15/2017 3:55:51 PM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: JeanLM
State capitalism is a Marxist principle, believe it or not. Even Lenin was inspired to create his New Economic Policy after careful consideration, and most likely going over Marx’s Principles of Communism, which mentions the following:
Above all, it (the revolution) will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. …
Bismarck had already created the first form of “state socialism” too, so Lenin was most likely looking towards that model, and setting up what he saw as the future “second struggle”.
27 posted on 08/15/2017 4:06:15 PM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: Olog-hai

A fair point.


28 posted on 08/16/2017 9:43:37 AM PDT by ALongRoadAhead
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To: Rinnwald

Also if not for WW2 the United States would have sat in the doldrums of the Depression that much longer. We needed (and got) a economy-size kick in the fanny.


29 posted on 08/16/2017 9:47:46 AM PDT by ALongRoadAhead
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