Thank the Lord for capitalism, a letter writer announced in the pages of The Californian. “Without capitalism,” asked the writer of February . 15′s “American capitalism : A love story,” “where would America be?” Just how capitalistic is the United States? Economics, the supposed “dismal science,” deals with how a society produces and distributes goods and services. The style of production and distribution can be considered on a continuum from laissez-faire capitalism on the far right to communism on the extraordinary left. Uncontrollable laissez-faire capitalism would have production of products and services in the non-public sector. If you lived in a tiny city, you may have a voluntary fire dept, but otherwise, the fire dept would be in private hands. As a non-public company, you would need to subscribe to their services.
Similarly, police protection would be in private hands and you might wish to subscribe to their services. The same is applicable to mail delivery, rubbish collection, faculties, city and city upkeep — the list keeps growing and on. The history of laissez-faire capitalism shows that it leads to exploitation, extremes of wealth and misery, and a collection of business booms and recessions. Employees were in the power of their bosses ; six- and seven-day work weeks with 12-hour work days were common.
Salary were at subsistence levels and sometimes even lower, causing families to have their kids at work. When employees attempted to form unions to better their conditions of work, they were met by force and violence from bullies employed by the company owners. Even state regimes, thru their army, helped put down any strikes activated by the employees.
Despite its sorrowful history, we continue to have folks today that wish to have a return to some kind of laissez-faire capitalism. In the early 1900s, state bodies were formed to manipulate impure food and drugs and the Fed. Trade Commission was formed to ban biased systems of competition. There followed the Fed Power Commission, the Fed Communications Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Fed. Deposit Insurance Establishment .
Other examples of govt programs include patents, copyrights, contributions, price lists, and Social Security and Medicare. The word socialism has been employed as a pejorative to scare the general population, but “socialism” has given us the Armed Services, the nation’s parks, State parks, town parks, the Post Office, public colleges, state varsities and schools, state and Fed jails, police departments, fire departments, health departments, the court system, the Forest Service, the interstate road system, Amtrak, the nation’s Work Relations Board, the Immigration and Nationalization Service, the nation’s Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Homeland Security. Obviously we have lots of “socialism” permeating our society and at best we can describe our business system as semi-capitalistic. Communism, on the other hand, condemns capitalism as malignant, looks for justice for the exploited employees, and wants the production of products and services to be utterly controlled by the employees themselves. Communism was attempted by the early Christians, and in other tiny communities, but all of them failed. The previous USSR, China, and East Germany made claims to be commie states, but they turned out to be dictatorships.
There wasn’t any “withering away of the state,” as promised, and the people had no control over the products and services. We do not need the extremes of laissez-faire capitalism or communism and it is apparent we are somewhere between. There are social programs in our industrial system and we needn’t consider it socialism as such ; the issue is to choose what social programs we need in our society and the way to pay for them.
The Great Recession of 2009 shows we had too much rash capitalism that led straight to conjecture and rampant greediness making social problems, unemployment, and a great quantity of distress. Critics of any quantity of socialism decry that it produces an abridgement of their liberty, but it is the other way around. In an unnecessary capitalistic society, you have tiny or no job security, maybe no health care insurance ; you will have interminable hours or 2 low paying roles, and little holiday time ( or a lot if you are fired ). The majority of the liberty belongs to the entrepreneurs, not to the employees. Capitalism can’t supply all the required roles, so we need the govt. to be the employer of last resort to make provision for a more humanitarian society.
Read about the Kaplan Pump