Socialist extremism is bad, Capitalist extremism is bad.
Now sounding phrase, unfortunately it's not grounded in realty. There have been few, if any, examples of capitalist "extremism". Hong Kong might have come the closest to a pure form of capitalism. I don't they did too badly though, if growing their economy from less than a third of Britain’s to approximately one and a third in 30 years is any gage.
My view is that unfettered, feral free-market capitalism, as practiced say in Victorian London or in the fantasies of the US right, eventually leads to gigantic inequality of wealth and huge suffering at the lower ends of the scale. Such inequality and suffering ultimately destroys societies.. see "Revolution, French" as a random example.
Which French Revolution are you talking about? The revolution of 1358, where the peasants throughout France rose spontaneously against their feudal lords and the government, or the revolution of 1789, a revolt against the most restrictive application of mercantilist policies in Europe, or perhaps you were referring to the revolution of 1830, which replaced a resolutely backward-looking government with one more amenable to commercial and industrial interests.
Oh I get it! You equate a high tax burden placed on peasants, the establishment protection and subsidy of monopoly industries, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few with capitalism. That’s pretty much a non-start then on everything you have to say about history, or capitalism.
The fact is that wealth distribution follows a leptokurtosis distribution. If we define income inequality with the distance between the end points - income inequality increases even as every income earner enjoys more wealth, but surely this is not a measure of suffering. In fact, it is a measure of economic well-being. It surely is a flaw of human nature that so many can advocate making people poorer in order to make them better off. |
