Capitalism is whatever you want to make of it. It can be bad or good to the ideologue. For the moment I'll post a few quotes for the readers. PS there are no givens and all functioning economies today are mixes. Good cooks and good economists realize the right combinations work best.
"Market fundamentalists hold a dogmatic, quasi-religious belief in unfettered market capitalism, and therefore oppose anything that restrains the business community, be it restrictions on the use of tobacco or the emission of greenhouse gases." 'Challenging Knowledge,' an essay in 'Agnotology'
"*Capitalism is the ownership and use of the concrete but dynamic elements in a society - what is commonly known as the means of production. A capitalist is someone who produces more capital through the production of the means he owns. This necessitates the periodic reinvestment of part of the capital earned into the repair, modernization and expansion of the means. Capitalism is therefore the ownership of an abstraction called capital, rendered concrete by its ownership of the means of production, which through actual production creates new capital.... However, capitalism as conceived today tends to revolve around something called the profit motive, even though profit is neither a cause of capitalism nor at the heart of the capitalist action. Profit is a useful result of the process, nothing more. As for the ownership of the means of production, this has been superseded by their management. And yet, to manage is to administer, which is a bureaucratic function. Alternately, there is a growing reliance upon the use of capital itself to produce new capital. But that is speculation, not production. Much of the development of the means of production is now rejected as unprofitable and, frankly, beneath the dignity of the modern manager, who would rather leave such labour and factory-intensive "dirty" work to Third World societies. Finally , the contemporary idea of capitalism grandly presents "service" as its new sophisticated manifestation. But the selling of one's own skills is not a capitalist art. And most of the jobs being created by the service industries are with the exception of the high-technology sector descendants of the pre-eighteenth-century commerce in trade and services." p360 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
"Greenspan, the foremost champion of free markets, turned out to believe in freeing them only on the way up. On the downward slope he favored massive government intervention-by himself. After the stock bubble burst he was as good as his word, flooding the economy with credit and liquidity and driving the Feds interest rate down from 6,5 percent in May 2000 to I percent by June 2003. His reputation had barely survived the stock market crash of 2000 but took a beating during the panic of 2008 when it became clear that Emperor Greenspan had no clothes. The symbolic end of his reign came on October 23, 2008, when, testifying before a House committee, he was asked in effect how he could have been so stupid. A chastened Greenspan confessed to having made mistakes and suffered the humiliation at a congressman's hands of being compared to a Boston Red Sox first basemen whose fielding error cost the Sox the 1986 World Series. This was the end of the line, for in American culture having a sporting metaphor deployed against you is the ultimate disgrace. A richly deserved blow of course, it came far too late to save all the sorry investors who had once believed Greenspan's was the word of God." p317 'A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001' by William L. O'Neill
And yet over the course of the decade the old skepticism toward business that had been born in the Great Depression and reawakened for a new generation in the Vietnam era finally began to disappear. The economic transformations of the decade would be interpreted through the framework of the free market vision. The 1970s campaigns to revive the image of capitalism among college students bore fruit in the 1980s. Universities created new centers for the study of business themes such as entrepreneurship. Students in Free Enterprise, a group started in 1975 to bring students together to "discuss what they might do to counteract the stultifying criticism of American business," thrived on small college campuses, funded by companies like Coors, Dow Chemical, and Walmart (as well as the Business Roundtable). The group organized battles of the bands, at which prizes would be doled out to the best pro-business rock anthems, helped silkscreen T-shirts with pro-capitalist messages, and created skits based on Milton Friedman's writings, which college students would perform in local elementary schools. In the workplace, the decline of the old manufacturing cities of [he North and Midwest and the rise of the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt metropolises marked the rise of a new economic culture, dominated by companies such as Walmart and Home Depot and Barnes & Noble." Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
