Why must Americans subscribe to the socialist order to pursue their happiness and opportunity?

[towwwdothello]

as opposed to pursuit in a free market?

[jamie s]

Socialism allows more of the common people to live a better life since there is little or no competition for goods and services. Everyone goes to work and makes the same amount of money. Free Market only allows some people to live a good life and to obtain more of the goods and services. The emphasis is put on competition where you have to prove yourself through education and effort. However, it doesn't really work that way. Look at the job market. College graduates as well as the high school graduates are struggling to get good jobs. If this was a socialistic society, we would all be working and making enough money to live on. There are a lot of high school dropouts who can perform jobs better than a lot of college grads. However, since the college grad has a paper that says he took so many hours of courses, he is considered more qualified than someone who actually has the talent or ability to do the job. Now, there are some jobs that require more education such as medicine, engineering, and legal areas, however, they don't really require the massive amounts of education that most universities require. In Russia, you only need to attend a medical school for 4 years to become a doctor and this is based on whether you have the talent for it,not a degree. Here in the U.S.A. you have to attend college for a 1st degree and then apply to medical school. You also have to serve a residency for a number of years afterwards. The society in the USA demands too much for the return that an individual can ever get back..

[justgoodfolk]

Capitalism is a failure, socialism the cure.

Capitalism, and the imperialist system that develops upon its economic foundations, is the main cause of human poverty, exploitation, violence and suffering in the modern world. As a system of socio-economic organization, capitalism long ago exhausted its historically progressive role. The blood-drenched history of the twentieth century – with its two world wars, innumerable “local” conflicts, the nightmare of Nazism and other forms of military-police dictatorship, eruptions of genocide and communal pogroms – is an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system. The number of victims claimed by capitalist-inspired violence runs into the hundreds of millions. And this figure does not include the consignment of the peoples of entire continents to unrelenting poverty, with all its attendant miseries.
The gigantic scale of the existing productive forces and the extraordinary advances in technology are more than sufficient not only to abolish poverty but also to guarantee every human being on the planet a high standard of living. Culture should be flowering amidst unprecedented material wealth. But, instead, conditions of life are deteriorating for the working class, and human culture, deprived of perspective and hope for the future, is in deep crisis. The source of the contradiction between what is and what should be is a global economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, and the irrational division of the world into rival nation-states.
All efforts to raise the living standards of the working class and address serious social problems run up against the barrier of private ownership of the means of production, the anarchy of the capitalist market, the economic imperatives of the profit system, and, last but not least, the insatiable greed and money-madness of the ruling class itself. The claim that the capitalist market is the infallible allocator of resources and the supremely wise arbiter of social needs stands utterly discredited amidst the endless series of speculative scandals and multi-billion dollar bankruptcies that have rocked the world economic system during the past decade. The boundary lines between “legitimate” financial transactions and criminal fraud have narrowed to the point of being almost invisible. The separation of the process of personal wealth accumulation from the production and creation of real value is an expression of the general putrefaction of the capitalist system.
The solution to the spreading economic crisis and the deteriorating social position of the working class lies not in the reform of capitalism, for it is beyond reform. The crisis is of a systemic and historical character. As feudalism gave way to capitalism, capitalism must give way to socialism. The key industrial, financial, technological and natural resources must be taken out of the sphere of the capitalist market and private ownership, transferred to society and placed under the democratic supervision and control of the working class. The organization of economic life on the basis of the capitalist law of value must be replaced with its socialist reorganization on the basis of democratic economic planning, whose purpose is the fulfillment of social needs.

Capitalism survived the 20th century not because objective conditions were insufficiently mature for socialism, but rather because the leadership of the mass working class parties was “insufficient” for socialist revolution. The working class again and again entered into epic struggles. But these struggles, misled by the Stalinists, social democrats, centrist and reformist organizations, ended in defeats.
Capitalism exists today because of the betrayals of the working class by its own organizations - the mass political parties and the trade unions. “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” These words, with which Leon Trotsky began the founding document of the Fourth International, remain supremely relevant as a definition of contemporary political reality. There is not a single mass organization in the world today that presents itself as an opponent of the existing world capitalist order, let alone summons the working class to revolution
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep200...-s25.shtml