What's wrong with capitalism?

The problem is the word. Just as we rarely talk about pants, we usually talk about a pair of pants, capitalism is only one-third of a word.  It is a three legged chair that is missing two legs.

Capitalism exists only as part of a package of Socialism and Communism.  Three isms developed by people who hated the incipient industrial commerce that they saw in 1820.

All three isms have commerce functioning in their midst, but the focus of the isms (Capitalism, Socialism and Communism) is about the amount of commerce that is owned and controlled by government.

Who actually cares how much of commerce government owns? 

The only issue is the extent to which commerce is thwarted.  In all Communist nations commerce was and is so severely thwarted that nearly all the people are hungry and most of the people are starving.  Such nations have little to export and no money to buy the abundant food that commerce produces everywhere else. 

The same is true for Socialist countries.  Commerce is thwarted to a lesser extent than under Communism, often by labor unions, and government ownership of vital services. Eventually the Socialist governments and their people figure out that Socialism restricts the ability of a nation to be fully productive, for citizens to be fully human and the Socialism is reduced as rapidly as possible.  Think Sweden, China, Israel and East Europe.

The appropriate word when one is talking about the subject of capitalism is commerce.  Commerce is the driving force of humanity.  It is encouraged or thwarted by government policies.  The degree of growth or restraint is a matter of interest to those few who understand commerce. The rest can argue ideology.

Comments

[jim]

There is nothing wrong with capitalism. It all depends on your personal value system. Capitalism in its truest forms seeks to exploit its fellow man to the fullest extent for the pursuit of economic wealth. Had there been no government regulations, and proper funding to police those regulations, true capitalists would have destroyed our planet, enslaved the people through economic extortion, and you and I would both be working in sweat shops while a few wealthy capitalists control all the money, and we would be fighting eachother for the crumbs. What do I mean?? I mean industries controlled by capitalists without regulation would pollute our country with heavy metals, destroy our forests, pollute our drinking water, enslave our people in debt, but then again its a pigs dream.
Clearly, there are a lot of people who would like to live the pigs dream. But without exploitation of your fellow man it is not posssible. So i would say capitalism and exploitation go hand in hand. Not that exploitation in mild forms is a bad thing, ie even friendships can be considered mutual exploitation. But capitalism takes it to a whole new level.

[Joe Noory]

When I get into arguments with nincompoops about their invecive hatred of 'capitalism', I'm not going to use the term capitalism any more. I'm going to use the term free enterprise.

As those who think they have a compliant about capitalism, and believe that it can simply be called off by a larger magesterial authority are rather amusing for a while, their ignorance is disturbing. Having spent my high school years in the DDR, what most of these defacto proponents of authoritarian command economies actually know of communism, indeed what academia teaches them about it, is so riddled with factual inacuracies, that those 'teaching' the material, for reasons of accuracy alone if nothing else, should be fired.

To quote from The Right Stuff: "monkey don't know."

[slapout9]

Michael, this one of your best posts so far. I would like to see you expand on the idea of the confusion of the definition of capitalism, because as your point out it is the source of many problems.