Communism, boiled down.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's PH45 talk for providing opportunity.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

That's PH45 talk for providing opportunity.

Yet, the US has very low social mobility compared to other industrialized countries, which all seem to go more left than the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=ht...mes.comQ2F2007 (for some reason it won't let you see it but if you copy paste parts of the article you can see that it is there)

When questioned about the enormous income inequality in the United States, the cheerleaders of America’s unfettered markets counter that everybody has a shot at becoming rich here. The distribution of income might be skewed, but America’s economic mobility is second to none.

That image is wrong, and these days it abets far too many unfair policies, including cuts in essential programs like Head Start or Medicaid. The poor, we are told, can use their own bootstraps. President Bush got away with huge tax cuts for the rich in part because nonrich Americans, who make up most of the population, believe everybody has a chance of making it into the club. Unfortunately, the American dream is not that broadly accessible.

Recent research surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a governmental think tank for the rich nations, found that mobility in the United States is lower than in other industrial countries. One study found that mobility between generations — people doing better or worse than their parents — is weaker in America than in Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain and France. In America, there is more than a 40 percent chance that if a father is in the bottom fifth of the earnings’ distribution, his son will end up there, too. In Denmark, the equivalent odds are under 25 percent, and they are less than 30 percent in Britain.

America’s sluggish mobility is ultimately unsurprising. Wealthy parents not only pass on that wealth in inheritances, they can pay for better education, nutrition and health care for their children. The poor cannot afford this investment in their children’s development — and the government doesn’t provide nearly enough help. In a speech earlier this year, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, argued that while the inequality of rewards fuels the economy by making people exert themselves, opportunity should be “as widely distributed and as equal as possible.” The problem is that the have-nots don’t have many opportunities either.

Here is another source that says the same thing:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pre...ust_report.htm

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

Forcing a theory?

Capitalism and communism are socio-economic theories.