Capitalism also drives greed, destruction and human misery as well as some other pretty evil things.
Interestingly, historical experiments in communism have led to vastly increased rates of environmental destruction as compared to market economies. The reason is fairly obvious if you have a some economic background and think about it for a bit; in a market economy with resource ownership, people who own resource rights (e.g. to fell the trees in an area) will notice that they can make a lot more money if they spread the resource sales over time; if they sell all their trees now, they'll push down the market value of lumber and have decreasing marginal returns on each tree they fell. In the presence of a rich market system including market mechanisms like futures, market participants make a lot more money planning for the future than just trashing the environment as fast as possible.
Compare this to a communist state. The people in charge of resource management don't make money anyway, so they don't really care about the same optimization a capitalist would. Of course, they can buy political favor at little cost to them by pushing way down the diminishing marginal returns curve and exhausting a resource way faster than a self-interested capitalist would. Great job, commissar, look at all this wood! After all, if you can make your peers happy for a few years you'll get a promotion to a better government position (or retire early on your pension) and the fact that this area is now barren is someone else's problem.
I think that's part of what's happening with oil, where renewable sources are going to replace them as a bulk good. If you have lots of it like Saudi Arabia, your capitalism-optimal strategy may be to pump up oil now, even if it significantly drives down prices.
It also may be rational to destructively mine lumber if that's the only way you can produce it competitively. Your competition might own woods closer to rivers, for example, making it cheaper for them to transport their wood to the customer.
Wouldn't it be ironic if all the energy directed to arguing Communism vs Capitalism had completely missed the fundamental principles on both sides?
What you're saying certainly makes sense though.
You didn't see West German border guards shooting people who were trying to get into East Germany.
You don't see people leaving Miami for Havana on rafts they've made out of trash bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts.
Why is that, do you suppose?
Capitalism uses the environment and when you mine something you use a resource. Capitalism was not really present in Nazi Germany and they were the cause of an unbelievable amount of destruction.
Human missery? Capitalism has almost eliminated all human missery, we are talking about it being a reasonable goal that by 2035 the should be no humans living at less than a dollar (adjusted for inflation) a day. In the last 15 years that number was cut in half, and it stayed mostly constant from 1900 to 1960 despite the fact that the worlds population grew massively.
The only reason you can even write that is that you have no idea what human missery was before Capitalism.
Interesting you say this, because (by a huge margin) the worst instances of all these things took place under non-capitalist governments. Here's a good rundown wrt destruction and human misery: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm
The most incredibly flourishing of human potential has, around and since the renaissance, occurred in market environments. It looks like greed and destruction and misery are probably going to happen no matter what (at least, no one has figured out to prevent them yet), but they seem to actually be minimized in market societies.
Is it wrong for a poor person to earn more money?
What is "too much"? Do people here, who are mostly globally (and often nationally) rich, earn "too much" money?
You cannot ignore externalities inherent to a system and claim yourself absolved of the consequences.
Comments like this must come from a background of absolute ignorance of utility theory or quantitative economics. I can't think that anyone would make this complaint if they thought critically for a moment about what they were suggesting.
Whether you like it or not, we live in a universe with scarce resources. Humans have finite time, matter, and energy that we need to allocate.
As of today (or at least the very near future), it's probably possible to keep any individual human alive for arbitrarily long. We just might burn trillions of dollars doing it. Obviously, even to someone who can't multiply, this doesn't make sense. If we did our absolute best to keep everyone in the world alive, we would run out of resources immediately.
Now, let's say instead of trillions of dollars, it's millions. This is a plausible multi-year treatment cost. Now instead of running out of resources at 10 people, it's 10,000,000 people. This is still less than the number of people in the world who would plausibly rack up these kind of costs if we didn't "refuse life-saving assistance except in return for payment".
The unfortunate harsh reality is that everyone's life has a finite value. It doesn't make sense to spend more resources keeping someone alive than they're worth; as I said, you'd run out of resources very quickly, even if we pretend it makes sense to dedicate 100% of humanity's output to medicine. Additionally, some people's lives are worth more to everyone else than others. People revile this fact for many reasons, but that's how it is. The market, and most individuals, place a higher value on the life of, say, a surgeon than on that of a busker. The market is a way to (surprisingly accurately) stochastically approximate the value people place on things, including the time of other people. A surgeon gets paid more because (assuming the market is allowed to operate unimpeded) they are valued more, and it therefore makes sense that (through the indirection of money) they are able to pay for that expensive multi-million dollar treatment if they get some complicated disease. Common objections to this include "what about rich retired people who aren't productive anymore", and the answer is that if people knew they couldn't spend the money they were saving right now later on, this would induce even more drastic inefficiencies than that of rich retirees being able to afford medical care more than people still in the workforce.
I am not interested in how/why you rationalize it or the morale judgements you make on it.
You cannot simultaneously claim no harm and feel the need to rationalize the harm caused. The fact you did attempt to do so means you acknowledge the harm caused and consider it acceptable.
Calling me ignorant for pointing out the ugly reality you so verbosely attempt to distance yourself from is quite amusing.
You harm a plant when you eat it to gain the calories to live. The act of eating an apple does not directly cause the harm but the process by which it arrives at your table does. Pretending such use of force and harm is not inherent to human life is extremely dangerous as it is the product of doublethink.