Read a version of this at a favorite news group of mine and had to share. Author unknown.
American Capitalism:
The owner of a business pulls into the company parking lot, driving a new Lexus.
One of his employees walks by and compliments him on it.
The owner replies, “If you are determined, set your goals, work really hard and put in the long hours, I can get an even nicer one next year.”
Please share widely!
I have five children, ranging from 18 to 31.
My advice to them is something like the following:
Self employment is rampant in my extended family for this reason.
American capitalism is proving to be a failed system as we all can’t be owners…..or can we?
We were once a nation of merchants and fabricators. Buy local, grow local, be local.
And that gave us the Middle Class.
…rather than the assembly line.
All workers are not under the control of others, and the merchant class prefers not to be. The basis of the capitalistic system is individual, rather than collective, effort.
Your mileage obviously varies.
So you mean winner take all and the majority gets the crumbs? If so, we agree, at least that is how the American system. Actually, according to Picketty, this is unique to Anglo Saxon nations and not so common in other developed nations. It seems rather barbaric, selfish, lacking empathy, like a sociopath, or a six month old child.
The best way to solve the problems of capitalism is to make more capitalists! Georgism, distrbutism, and even most forms of christian democracy or social market democracy favor this. Cooperative ownership and co-management are essential to this as well. There are a lot of forms of capitalism that we could explore that could actually benefit many people, and could gain support from Yankee republicans like porcupine as well as lefties. Even a return to Fordism would be a welcome change from the present.
The American model is not that-it is a crony capitalism that favors those who already have access to capital and power accumulating even more at the expense of everyone else. Teddy Roosevelt was a trust buster and union supporter precisely since he felt it was essential that small businesses and the worker have an equivalent seat at the table and bargain as equals with the captains of industry.
Is rampant in my family. When I hear people tell me that American Capitalism is great as long as you are lucky enough to be one of the inside players, it reminds me of a man in the USSR telling us that Soviet Communism was a great system and all you had to do is join the party and work your way up the ladder from there as a party bureaucrat.
Why not work to change the flawed system instead of adding to the mess?
I think that self employment is a step to the better goal of employee owned companies. Stakeholders, not shareholders. We ought to change the tax codes to help move this along.
Own the casino.
Is the engine that drives the bus. Capitalism and Progressive values need not be in conflict.
I think some would argue that a consumer economy, or even a free market economy, is the engine you speak of.
There are other models besides “Capitalism” in the sense we’re using it here. There are, after all, first-world nations that describe themselves as “socialist” whose bus is moving along quite nicely.
have worked out fine for Germany. I often look at Germany as a better model economy than the Nordic countries since it is less isolated, almost as much of a global player as we are, less homogenistic, a similar devolved form of federalism, and has more of a mixed economy. It is simply impossible to replicate the Nordic model in the US, but I think we can get to where Germany is in a decade or so with the right mixtures of policies.
But, I think of Germany’s economy as heavily driven by private ownership of industry. I don’t think of industry in Germany as being largely cooperative, and certainly not state owned. Given the brain power on BMG, I’m sure someone on here can (and will) educate me.
Mitbestimmungsrecht is a term used by Germans to describe their belief that labor needs to be consulted along with the investor class on all matters relating to the economy of a country and in some cases, labor even has a seat on the board of directors with German companies. (not too sure of the details).
For another example, look how Walmart failed in Germany
From the article:
Walmart’s ethical code caused much frustration as well.
The feedback of the employees was ignored.
Works for me as the engine that drives the bus. I’m not sure about “consumer economy” but certainly consumer spending is a key to economy. That spending is on products, goods, and service, I think, which is tied to capitalism or free markets. BTW, what’s the aversion to the term “capitalism” as the engine that drives the bus? Isn’t it just an economic and political system in which trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit rather than the government or “social ownership”? Sure, there are first world nations that describe themselves as socialist that do okay. I prefer free market capitalism and progressive values.
We have, since 1980 or so, allowed those “private” business owners to concentrate so much wealth (and therefore power) that they have utter and complete ability to do pretty much anything they like (how much did it actually cost the “private” companies who made billions of dollars during the Iraq invasion after they were shown to be committing murder?).
We have dismantled virtually ALL restraints on business behavior, while simultaneously removing most tools that individuals have to fight back. It wasn’t so long ago that it was illegal for credit card issuers to charge more than 18% per annum interest, and illegal to collect late fees for bills less than 30 days old. It was also, at that time, possible for consumers to file bankruptcy and walk away from that debt.
When was the last time you looked at a credit card statement?
I ask because my bills are now due just two weeks after the statement date, and in practice even less because it takes days for the statement to arrive. I happen to choose a card with a lower interest rate, but I assure that MANY banks charge 24% and higher — none of those banks pay more than 1-2% on savings accounts (remember when the interest rate on a savings bank was 5%, and on NOW accounts 7.5%?).
We need progressive policies. Lower subsidies for highly profitable businesses that pollute (oil), higher taxes on the wealthy, higher taxes on capital gains, more government spending on infrastructure, subsidies for green energy, graduated income taxes at the state level, single payer health insurance.
Tax policies in the 1950s were far more redistributionist than they are now. There are a lot of reasons to return to that — and it’s going to be politically difficult.
As Picketty and others have pointed out, we have a lot of inherited wealth now. Inheritance taxes aren’t what they were either.
via government policy as they ignore how government policy since the 1960’s to present day has been steadily redistributing wealth from the labor class to the rentier class. Or as Senator Warren had said, hammered the middle class.
A vehicle driven by an engine with no controls is a disaster in the making. Somebody has disabled the brakes and steering in today’s bus, and like the old Fung Wah buses, it periodically bursts into flame.
I sometimes think I’d buy the free market rhetoric a lot more if I got the sense its promoters actually believed it themselves, but often the market isn’t free; it’s often fixed to favor those who are already doing just fine thank you. Pure capitalism is when you and I each open a business selling the same good or service and we compete. Maybe one of us offers better quality and the other offers a lower price. We rise and fall solely on our ability to sell our good or service and we, not faceless shareholders, own our own business. Moving money around for its own sake through the stock market, hedge funds, etc is what makes “capitalism” untenable.
FWIW, the other side of the great economic-ideological struggle, communism was also bastardized. Communism as practiced by the USSR was not quite what Karl Marx had in mind, and consequently came to be seen as evil for reasons not foreseen or intended by Marx.
That’s an inevitable result of unregulated markets. The freedom is to consolidate market strengths into monopolies.
Karl Polyani is the sensible middle man between Smith and Marx. His Great Transformation was one of the best books I was required to read in the Core, and it sits there on the shelf right between my Marx Reader and On the Wealth of Nations. His economic democracy is a very extreme form of stakeholder rather than shareholder capitalism and is enjoying a revival thanks to Thomas Piketty.
I usually think of Keynes as being somewhere in the middle, though I have been happy to learn more recently that even Smith included thoughts on making sure things didn’t go too far off the rails.