You aren't broke because of the system, you are broke because you make bad life choices

It's an absolute fact that the system needs low-wage workers to do the onerous work of society. Building roads, cleaning buildings, maintenance work, janitorial work, restaurant work, etc., etc.

You can blame "the illegals" (and their whopping 3% of the population) for this but even in the Golden Age of the US of the first half of the 20th century there were tons of poor people and low-paying jobs.

Poverty is simply built into the capitalist system. It's a winners and losers system so someone HAS to lose.
 
It's an absolute fact that the system needs low-wage workers to do the onerous work of society. Building roads, cleaning buildings, maintenance work, janitorial work, restaurant work, etc., etc.

You can blame "the illegals" (and their whopping 3% of the population) for this but even in the Golden Age of the US of the first half of the 20th century there were tons of poor people and low-paying jobs.

Poverty is simply built into the capitalist system. It's a winners and losers system so someone HAS to lose.

Additionally, a lot of people in a capitalist economy don't participate. Kids, the elderly, students, the disabled, people who are between jobs, and unpaid caretakers, most notably. Even if we randomly assigned individuals from outside those groups to pay for individuals inside them, we'd have a lot of poverty. But it's worse because young people are both more fertile and lower-earning on average, and people in collapsed local economies still get disabled and are born. It's an unavoidable fact that in a market-based economy, between a fifth and a third of the population will be living below the poverty line absent transfer payments. Also a fact that countries with market-based economies have all independently developed a system to deal with that (involving transfer payments like SS or welfare). That actually works to reduce poverty (for example, pre-tax-and-transfer poverty in Finland--looking at 2010 but it's similar from year to year--is just under a third, and post-tax-and-transfer poverty is about 7%). Exhorting poor people to eat garbage doesn't work.
 
Additionally, a lot of people in a capitalist economy don't participate. Kids, the elderly, students, the disabled, people who are between jobs, and unpaid caretakers, most notably. Even if we randomly assigned individuals from outside those groups to pay for individuals inside them, we'd have a lot of poverty. But it's worse because young people are both more fertile and lower-earning on average, and people in collapsed local economies still get disabled and are born. It's an unavoidable fact that in a market-based economy, between a fifth and a third of the population will be living below the poverty line absent transfer payments. Also a fact that countries with market-based economies have all independently developed a system to deal with that (involving transfer payments like SS or welfare). That actually works to reduce poverty (for example, pre-tax-and-transfer poverty in Finland--looking at 2010 but it's similar from year to year--is just under a third, and post-tax-and-transfer poverty is about 7%). Exhorting poor people to eat garbage doesn't work.

Good point.

The most we can ask for in a system like this is for there floor for that suffering. So a Scandinavian-style system where poverty still exists, but it's not harrowing or violent as in the US. That's the extent of it though.

And this doesn't even take international sphere into account. Even if the entire West has high levels of development and low levels of poverty, it does so on account of the Third World's cheap labor and resources. It is truly impossible for every country in the world to be "developed" in the way that we currently understand developed countries to look like.
 
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