[SteveA]

People say the war in Iraq is representative of capitalism.

I slaim the war represents nothing of capitalism but of socialist tendancies in our populace instead.

Capitalism is based upon individual private ownership and free trade. Corporations are just an extension of that when things are owned in common between multiple people, though corporate laws have been corrupting to this institution (just as marriage laws have corrupting to that institution).

Anyway, a typical socialist stance is that it's ok to steal forcibly from one person using police as long as there's envisioned to be enough benefit to others in the process. Property rights take a sideline to "society's" interests (whatever that means) and the desires of the whole outweight the rights of the minority.

It's oftentimes placed in a class warfare setting where people are no longer treated equally but it becomes us versus them, and their property rights don't count (but ours do, of course).

Let's draw parallels of this ideology with what's happening in Iraq:

1) Someone has something valuable that needs to be redistributed.

Problem: Iraq has oil.

2) Justify why property rights must be ignored.

Excuse: Terrorists have infiltrated the country.

3) Government forces arrive on the scene to fix these injustices to insure "freedom and democracy" prevail (somehow simulaneously though it seems impossible - isn't democracy based upon outnumbering someone - might makes right, whereas freedom is based upon protecting individual liberties against such force?)

Resolution: U.S. forces invade the area and take control to create a new government to control the area.

(You can compare that last one to the IRS attaching your wages or the courts giving away your property etc.)

Maybe oil truly had nothing to do with our involvement in Iraq but in either event, capitalism is respective of the property of others, and denies force as a means to promote "trade" with someone.

Some of the signs of socialism creating the war in Iraq are also:

1) A government run economy, or control of our industries. We have Halliburton that supposedly won a no-bid contract to do the rebuilding there.

2) Many people were already declining in their support of things after Afghanistan,

3) Socialism fails, and as usual the promises of rebuilding Iraq have resulted in a poor quality of life there. We still took plenty of resources from the U.S., so the costs remain real while the benefits remain limited.

4) The U.S. was created as a federal structure, yet when Iraqies proposed a federal structure for their government, our leaders discouraged such a choice. Socialism relies on large scale centralization to power these institutions. Capitalism doesn't rely on much of anything except the individual freedom to use what they have as they wish.

The war in Iraq is a result of socialistic views in our society, not out of any respect for capitalistic principles.