Continuing from Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 9 I’m going to continue the discussion of overall US culture by looking at politics and attitude, tomorrow and Friday I’ll actually start talking about sports.  No need for summarizing, hit the link and read if you didn’t already.  Let’s get to it.

Quick note: I’m quite sure that someone with a background in economics will get really upset about the next section, being concerned that I over-generalized some factor or left out some incredibly detailed nuance of the system that is just critically important to their mental health that I discuss in detail.  Just keep in mind what I’m doing here which is NOT trying to write the be-all end-all series on Capitalism.  Or America.

Or a whole bunch of other topics that folks have been busting my nuts for skimming details on because they can’t seem to keep in mind what my actual topic is.  Entire books have been written about a topic that I’m going to spend about 6 paragraphs on and clearly I’m not trying to be comprehensive.  This is a grossly overgeneralized view of the US economic system.  Let it go and get over yourselves.

Politico-Economic Rhetoric

While it should go without saying, I’m going to say it anyway: the US is based around a capitalistic democratic political structure.  And no we’re not going to argue about whether or not it’s a real democracy, take that crap to Facebook or elsewhere.   I’m mainly going to focus on the capitalist end of things anyhow and demonstrate that I’m about as much of an economist as I am a geographer.

Capitalism is roughly defined (as Googled) as a system where a countries trade and profits are determined by private entities rather than the government.  This distinguishes it from Communist and Socialist countries where the government controls things and usually mucks it up because the system is based around political crap and individual agendas instead of what actually produces results or profit.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 10