Ah, there is a lot to respond to, so let me respond to the pieces I think to be the most important to the discussion.

Although our method of survival must be our mind, I don't see what that has to do with morality. Although the mind might be used to engage in moral actions, it might as soon be used to destroy or harm others. And helping yourself at the expense of others is widely considered absolute immorality, while the person who helps others is widely considered moral.

Further, this statement appears to assume that the mind is used to some greater extent in capitalism, though I do not see why this would be the case. Perhaps it could be said that the mind is used to benefit oneself more in capitalism, but that is not necessarily moral.

Well, I don't know about this example. I'm not certain who would say that a married person should be granted more money than a single person. I don't think any socialist or communist would say that either. What socialism might say, however, is that if you work 40 hours and someone else works 40 hours, you both get paid the same amount of money for that 40 hours.

Perhaps a better point is the question about if one achieves, who is to say he doesn't deserve it? Understand though, that achievement in capitalism is getting the most for yourself. So the question is sort of, "If one person grabs up the most for himself, who is to say he doesn't deserve it?" Well, I say that he doesn't deserve it. If a bunch of money falls from the sky, is the person who deserves most of that money the fastest and tallest person who is more capable of grabbing it? Or does the fact that someone is fast and tall really make no indication about how much money he deserves.

Just because we have created an economic system in which certain people are able to make themselves lots of money, doesn't mean that we've created a system where the people who are able to make that money actually deserve it. And I think in capitalism, we can say that those people don't deserve it. They aren't the most moral and selfless people, that is certain. They may be hard workers, but there are also people who work harder or just as hard and achieve nothing. And often it may not even be hard workers who get the most in capitalism. Sometimes capitalism even benefits people just for their appearances or natural athletic ability. Are these the people who deserve the most?

But is our law as equal as it could be? I think it certainly is not. It would be far more equal if we did not engage in capitalism but instead engaged in socialism. Of course freedom is traded for that equality, and in this situation, we must determine which system is best for everyone.

Now it may be true that some people are ugly and some people are dumb, but are you content to say, "hey, some people have a crappy life, but I don't care?" Wouldn't you want to do something about it, to try to make their lives better? I am not content to say, "Well, our current system treats some people better than others, but hey, people are born with better traits than others, so who cares if our economic system does the same thing?" No, if there is a better system out there, we should change to that system.

If Socialism or Communism worked, the vast majority of people would enjoy a better life, a life with more money and better access to goods and services. Why wouldn't you want that? Why wouldn't you want an economic system that makes everyone equal?

I disagree. The weak, dumb, and helpless deserve just as much as the next person. If anything, it is not performance which matters, it is kindness, desire to help others above oneself, and humility which matter.

This is an idea burned into you by capitalism. You imply that a person's value is determined by how well he succeeds in capitalism. The more able you are to use capitalism to your advantage, the better you are as a person. Capitalism = morality. But I don't think that's a good way to judge someone's worth at all.

I think you may be under the innaccurate assumption that with enough work, anyone can achieve as much as someone else or that hard work necessarily makes you better off in capitalism. Those things are not true.

However, this leads to a more important question: why should one have to work?

Why don't you deserve it? Again, you are suggesting that we each deserve only what our skill allows us in the capitalistic system. You are saying that if you can't get it in capitalism, you don't deserve it at all. I don't think that makes sense.

I think that every person who wants to be a professional football player deserves to be one. This doesn't change that reality of the situation: that it is impossible for everyone to achieve that goal under any system that actually works. But it doesn't change the fact that people deserve those things, that we should try to make the lives of others better.

Yet does this mean that the laborer could not succeed as a creator or developer? Does this mean that the CEO puts in more work or effort than a creator or a developer? I suggest that the answer to both is no. It is usually just the case that the laborer has never had the chance to become a CEO, and it may be that they work harder and put in more hours than a CEO.

And is it even the case that the CEO puts out more creativity and ideas than the laborer? Even that statement is often false. Take my job, for example. I am a computer programmer. The order comes down from the CEO, some general order which anyone could come up with: make me a program that processes recalls. So the developers get to work. We analyze the market, determine the necessary functions of the system, design an easy-to-use interface, create an architecture for the application, set up the object model, and even come up with creative ways to make every line of code run faster.

So do you suggest that the development team at my work couldn't cut it as CEO's? Do you suggest that someone this CEO is a more moral and deserving person than the rest of us? Do you suggest that he has some natural skill that indicates that he deserves to live in wealth and luxury while the rest of us deserve only to scrape by with each paycheck? I disagree with each of those statements.

Karl Marx's belief about how Communism would start makes no indication that Communism is actually based on conflict or struggle. Have you forgotten that our own system was started through a revolutionary war? Simply because Marx predicted that a revolution would spur Communism doesn't mean conflict and struggle have anything to do with the actual workings of the system.

Again, it is not the person who uses his mind the most or the best who makes the most money in capitalism. Furthermore, that person shouldn't make more money than the next person anyway.

Now, I didn't mean to say that greed is a bad thing. I meant to say that it is a value of capitalism, and it is not a trait of morality. The reason it isn't moral is because it means we are doing good things only for our own benefit. If we provide a good or service, we are doing it only to benefit ourselves. So the person who makes the most money is very likely the person who wants to benefit himself the most.

I don't mean that one person making himself happy is immoral. It is just not a sign of moral. It isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't mean the person doing it is necessarily kind or caring at all. So it isn't the moral people who are succeeding, it is the greediest people, the people who want to make the most money for themselves.

As I said, not everyone who rises to the top began wealthy, but the vast majority of people who are wealthy today were wealthy when they were born.

It's true that Bill Gates succeeded based on his idea, for example. But Bill Gates's success was based on luck as much as his idea. First, let me point that Gates wasn't exactly middle class. He went to Harvard. He could afford to fund starting up a business despite having no real source of income. And he was educated against making mistakes. And yes, he had the skills to convince people.

And like I said, he was lucky. Most people's businesses fail. A lot of people who put a lot of work and a lot of money into their ideas just don't make it. And that's capitalism.

First, I did not say that someone else has to fail in order for another to succeed, only that it does sometimes happen that way, and when it does, it is not the moral choice that results in success in capitalism.

Further, Ford, Carnegie, Rockefellar, and Gates didn't sacrifice their fortuntes providing these services, they made their fortunes doing it. And whether we would have been better off without them is a matter of opinion; they weren't the only ones providing these services, they simply crushed the competition through better advertising or whatever other method they used to convince people to use their services. There are many people, for example, who think we would be better off today if Apple has remained the champion of computers. And do we truly think that no one could have designed an operating system better than Bill Gates, or do we simply think that he was the person with the most opportunity to do it?

And beyond that, why don't you single out the individual laborers under Ford, Carnegie, Rockefellar, and Gates and point out their contributions? Do you think it was Bill Gates or his development team and testing teams who did most of the work and thinking that made Windows great? What about the other products Microsoft has offered? What about in most companies? Why is it that the man with the idea and the funds to make that idea a reality is the one who gets the most, and the people who do the real work and thinking behind that idea get very little? Is that really the way it should be?

Remember that Socialism and Communism don't say people like Gates, Carnegie, and other entrepreuners shouldn't exist. Those systems say that everyone who does the work for those companies should be making the same amount of money as the guy on top. Why should they be making less?

I agree. I didn't say that anyone should be forced to live morally. I didn't even say that we should design an economic system that favors moral people over immoral people. I said that it would be better if everyone was equal in our economic system; there would be no pressure for them to live their lives to benefit others.

I did say, however, that it is not the moral people who are benefitted in capitalism, that it is instead whatever random people are able to best operate under our laws, and that usually includes greedy people with money to spend.

I think most people's morality suggests that someone who gives his own life to save another's is a good person. But regardless of whether a man should help others before he has given himself the same, this does not change the fact that capitalism does not benefit the people who help others.

This is pretty much true. Though the actuality of the situation is that it doesn't matter how hard you work, it matters how much you produce and how much money you can make from it. Some people work hard and get nothing, while others work hard and are successful because of what they produce. Capitalism is successful because a lot of stuff is produced, and it's stuff that people want.

In socialism, there is less desire to produce because producing more doesn't bring more money and more success. You could produce almost nothing and still get the same amount of money.

But what if that weren't true? What if there was a way to design a system where there is incentive to produce in socialism? What if there were a way to make our current system more equal while keeping that desire to produce? Wouldn't that be a good system? And if that desire to produce were as strong as the desire in capitalism, wouldn't it be even better than capitalism?

Simply because no one has thought of or attempted to run an economic system like that, an economic system that combines the good ideas from capitalism and the good ideas from communism, doesn't mean that such an economic system could not exist.

You say that our system is flawed because it is not truly a free market, then you describe a situation in which the free market makes a bunch of hard-working people bankrupt? I'm not sure I see the connection here.

Our system is not truly a free market because a truly free market has a lot of problems. In a free market, businesses can hide what they put in their food, making people sick over time. So we put in health regulations. In a free market, businesses can pollute cities, destroying the health of everyone, so we put in a regulation to stop that. In a truly free market, there wouldn't even be civil rights laws, and people who aren't successful businessmen could be treated as poorly as a business wants, and they'd have to accept it because they need the money. So we create worker's rights.

Now perhaps not every regulation we've created is a good one; there are lots of politicians who don't know a good idea from a bad one. But I think you'd do well to understand that no system is perfect, and a free market is far from it. It has problems which need to be addressed.

Capitalism is not specifically about greed, it is just that the greedy succeed. The people who want profit the most are the people who will succeed in a system that is designed around making profit. Greedy people aren't necessarily bad people. But they aren't necessarily good people, either. So the people who succeed in capitalism don't really deserve to have more than the next person.

Capitalism does work off choice in that people choose what products to buy and in doing so, they choose which businesses are successful. I have no problems with that part. But the way capitalism works, a few people have a whole lot of wealth, while other, equally deserving people, don't have enough. And that's where the problem comes in.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that I hate everything about capitalism. I think it's the best system that anyone has actually tried. But it is important for us to recognize that it still has big problems, just like any other system, and solutions to those problems should be considered.