Consider online streaming services like YouTube and Twitch.tv. Not only can you watch an endless stream (pun intended) of video material from them, but in fact you can upload and stream your own content. All this for the low, low price of... absolutely nothing. These services do not charge you anything.
Consider how incredible expensive a service like YouTube and Twitch.tv is. For example Google has an astonishing amount of expensive hardware all over the world, just in order to provide this service. Their server rooms are absolutely enormous. And the required internet bandwidth for the staggering amount of data needed for this amount of video streaming isn't exact cheap either (it's not like major internet service providers are going to give all this bandwidth to Google for free).
Of course this isn't the only free service that big corporations are offering. Wikis, email services, blogging services (this very blog you are reading right now is completely free to use), real-time maps and location services... You name it. And it doesn't cost you a penny to use them (other than the general fees of your own ISP, which in today's world is laughably little.)
Consider that super-computer you are probably carrying with you in your pocket. Smartphones today are much faster and efficient than even the world's top supercomputers in the late 80's and early 90's. Those supercomputers cost back then millions and millions of dollars. How much did your smartphone cost? You can get a smartphone today that's much faster than those supercomputers for less than 100 dollars/euros. (An equivalent device in the late 80's, assuming it had been physically possible due to the technology back then, would have probably cost tens or hundreds of millions.)
And nowadays you can usually use that phone to call people and browse the internet for pennies. It's laughably cheap. In fact smartphones are nowadays so laughably cheap that even many homeless people have them. That's how affordable they are.
And the list could go on and on.
People having free or extremely affordable access to all these services and products sounds like what communists think that a communist utopia would be like.
But how? How can all these corporations afford offering all these free and cheap services and cheap products, which benefit pretty much everybody?
Not thanks to a communist form of economy, that's for certain.
Is capitalism perfect? Of course it isn't. Nothing is. But it looks to me significantly better than what communism has been. Looking at all the examples of communism in the real world, it looks to me that it only leads to poverty, totalitarianism, and mass extermination of people.
Consider how incredible expensive a service like YouTube and Twitch.tv is. For example Google has an astonishing amount of expensive hardware all over the world, just in order to provide this service. Their server rooms are absolutely enormous. And the required internet bandwidth for the staggering amount of data needed for this amount of video streaming isn't exact cheap either (it's not like major internet service providers are going to give all this bandwidth to Google for free).
Of course this isn't the only free service that big corporations are offering. Wikis, email services, blogging services (this very blog you are reading right now is completely free to use), real-time maps and location services... You name it. And it doesn't cost you a penny to use them (other than the general fees of your own ISP, which in today's world is laughably little.)
Consider that super-computer you are probably carrying with you in your pocket. Smartphones today are much faster and efficient than even the world's top supercomputers in the late 80's and early 90's. Those supercomputers cost back then millions and millions of dollars. How much did your smartphone cost? You can get a smartphone today that's much faster than those supercomputers for less than 100 dollars/euros. (An equivalent device in the late 80's, assuming it had been physically possible due to the technology back then, would have probably cost tens or hundreds of millions.)
And nowadays you can usually use that phone to call people and browse the internet for pennies. It's laughably cheap. In fact smartphones are nowadays so laughably cheap that even many homeless people have them. That's how affordable they are.
And the list could go on and on.
People having free or extremely affordable access to all these services and products sounds like what communists think that a communist utopia would be like.
But how? How can all these corporations afford offering all these free and cheap services and cheap products, which benefit pretty much everybody?
Not thanks to a communist form of economy, that's for certain.
Is capitalism perfect? Of course it isn't. Nothing is. But it looks to me significantly better than what communism has been. Looking at all the examples of communism in the real world, it looks to me that it only leads to poverty, totalitarianism, and mass extermination of people.
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