The typical claim is that "socialist"\* regimes have killed "100 million" people. This always includes famines and other things that are blamed on socialism and its supposed inefficiency, for instance, the 36 million people that died during the Chinese famine.

Well, let's see how better and how efficient capitalism is then.

(\*Note: To be rigorous, many would agree that calling those regimes "socialist" is not accurate. But this post is about capitalism, not socialism, so let's not get into that.)

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* [UNICEF](http://www.unicef.org/sowc06/pdfs/sowc06_chap1.pdf), [RESULTS](https://web.archive.org/web/20080527011602/http://www.results.org/website/article.asp?id=241), and [Bread for the World](http://www.bread.org/hunger/global/facts.html) estimate that **15 million** people die **each year** from preventable poverty, of whom 11 million are **children under the age of five**. ([source](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/08/crimes-against-humanity-01-poverty-murder-over-400-million-people-since-1995-more-than-all-wars-in-recorded-history.html))

So in **10 years, capitalism kills more children under the age of 5 than socialism did in 150 years**.

>"But that's not capitalism's fault! That's just scarcity/underdevelopment!"

So why are you blaming 36 million deaths of the Chinese famine on socialism and its inefficiency?

[We have enough food to feed 10 billion people](https://www.oxfam.ca/there-enough-food-feed-world). Even assuming 20% of it is lost, we could still feed the entire population of the world. But we don't, because the logistics of it is expensive and inefficient. Because developing poor countries is too expensive, and sending them food "disrupts the local markets".

If these people didn't need to operate under capitalism to survive, sending them food wouldn't be an issue. If we prioritized things properly, we could develop self-sustainable agriculture projects everywhere in the world.

But we don't. Because of capitalism.

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Or something closer to us in the west:

* In the US alone, [20,000 to 40,000 deaths every year](http://obamacarefacts.com/facts-on-deaths-due-to-lack-of-health-insurance-in-us/) because of lack of health insurance. On average, that's 300,000 over the last decade.

>"But who's going to pay for it?"

All major developed countries on Earth offer universal healthcare. The US doesn't, and blames it on costs and making sure the "markets" are open for insurance companies, so that citizens "have options". All these claims are demonstrably false, and universal healthcare is known to be cheaper and more efficient.

We could be preventing all those deaths. But we don't, because of capitalism.

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* In the US, "approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty" ([sources](https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/how-many-us-deaths-are-caused-poverty-lack-education-and-other-social-factors)). So that's about 2 million people every 10 years in the US alone.

Many of these factors are related, and they are all connected to problems with capitalism. We could offer high quality education and social support for these people. We could have programs that are more inclusive to minorities. But we don't, because that's too expensive, and that gives us a reason to not take these problems seriously.

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* [5.5 million people died in the 1876-1878 famine in India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378) because the British performed a laissez faire experiment with grain trade.

You can't NOT blame this one on capitalism and the belief in free markets as perfect systems for managing resources.

* [10 million died in the Great Bengal famine of 1770](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770), also because of profit-seeking British involvement.

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* [500,000 Iraqis died in the Iraq war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War), all because of oil and US imperialism.

>"But you can't blame war for resources on capitalism!"

Then why does socialism gets blamed for even less involvement?

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* [Many wars were motivated by imperialism and lack of large-scale cooperation and fight for resources](http://www.petersaysstuff.com/2014/05/attempting-the-impossible-calculating-capitalisms-death-toll/), and these can be partially or fully blamed on capitalism and the need for expansion and profit. Any **remotely conservative** estimate will already put **capitalism's death toll over half a BILLION people from these wars alone**.

These motivations are something socialism and communism actively fight against. This is exactly the kind of problem that we are trying to solve by getting rid of capitalism.

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Other things:

* In the UK, [there are 10 times more empty houses than homeless families](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/housing-crisis-10-empty-homes-5008151).  In the US, [it's almost 6 houses for every homeless person](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-skip-bronson/post_733_b_692546.html). We could give everybody a home, but we don't, because the "market is the most efficient way of allocating resources".

>"But we can't just give people houses! Who's going to pay for it?"

>"That's not fair. I'm stuck with my mortgage and a homeless dude gets a free house!?"

* Worldwide, [100 million people are homeless and as many as 1.6 billion lack adequate housing](https://www.homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/). We could build housing for everyone, but we don't, because who's going to pay for it? Who's going to do all the work?

Because of capitalism, we find ourselves in ridiculous situations like this, and everyone thinks it's NORMAL AND OK.

Capitalism discourages us from helping others because that is seen as "unfair". What's the point of having good intentions under capitalism?

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And this is just the things I bothered searching in 10 minutes. There are many more things I could tie to capitalism.

From this alone we can already see that, **even excluding the wars, capitalism has easily killed more than three times the amount that is attributed to socialism in a fifth of the time**, due to the same sort of "inefficiency and incompetence" as it is attributed to socialism.

Excluding the wars, a rough UNDERestimate using the above figures adjusting for global population size every 25 years, puts capitalism death toll at  **400-700 million people in the last century alone**.

**That makes capitalism AT LEAST 8 TIMES more efficient at killing people than socialist and "communist" regimes.**

If you OVERestimate, capitalism has killed over **1.3 BILLION** people in the last 100 years, making it 19x more efficient at killing people because of inefficiency and incompetence.

Now imagine including the wars.

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These statistics are rough and not at all rigorous, but that doesn't matter. The same criticism can be made for a lot of the statistics used against socialism and communism *even as ideas*, instead of specific historic attempts plagued by many other issues. But nobody who claims to be striving for accuracy makes *that* argument, and instead, the "100 million" figure is perfectly reasonable and undeserving of a careful, critical look.

Even if I'm 80% off with all of these figures, capitalism *still* comes out with a worst death toll in the last century than what is attribute to socialism. You can also argue for a *per capita* analysis, but then you should not be talking about socialist regimes being worse than capitalism before you also do the same detailed analysis for capitalism as well, which nobody will bother doing before defending capitalism. The fact everyone simply assumes capitalism fares better shows how easy capitalism has it in the minds of people.

Finally, the fact so many people look at this and simply *refuse* to even *acknowledge* capitalism is to blame for *any* of these deaths, not even a fraction of them, shows exactly the kind of hypocrisy and lack of perspective defenders of capitalism have, and the immense lack of accountability of capitalism.

And if after looking at all of this the best counterargument you have for this criticism of capitalism is defending the "100 million" figure against socialism, then you are completely oblivious to that lack of accountability.

And this is why I made this post.

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Capitalism forces us to look at these problems and accept them as part of life. Capitalism makes no attempt to address these issues, so it gets a pass for them. It's a horrifying ethical relativism that would not be tolerated in any other circumstance. Can responsibility only exist with intent? The ethical foundations of most cultures and legal systems in our society disagree. People generally agree that negligence is not an acceptable excuse.

But capitalism gets a pass.

It feels like just because it's not someone pointing a gun at another person, and you have access to 20 types of cereal and an iPhone, Capitalism gets a pass on all this crap.

But misery, hunger, suffering and death are still there, and are just as real. They just drag for longer to the point we all get used to it. Suffering is not just a statistic, these are actual human beings suffering because of the social and economic structures we created in our world. It's all just a horror picture constantly playing in the background of our lives, one that most people simply get used to.

And to me, that makes it worse, because in a way it's as if we're all pulling a very slow trigger, and we're supposed to be PROUD of it.

And that's the real atrocity here. **Capitalism turns us into monsters**, and we are *proud* of it as a civilization.