Do you truly understand the bad part? You seem to dismiss it.
I don't dismiss the ills of capitalism.
I simply accept them as being inherent to capitalism and deal with it/them accordingly. One can oppose or not prefer capitalism to the alternatives. That's fine. But to say that both the good and bad of capitalism aren't both property aspect of it is just wrong.
In referring to what folks see in their daily lives, I was absolutely illustrating capitalism and its problems. You may think these monetary problems are good, but most people do not.
I do not think they are good. I think they are things that capitalism creates. One has only a few choices:
- Recognize each economic model for what it is, pros and cons and work within that model.
- Aim to modify the model to some greater or lesser extent, which essentially means have government intervene and constrain the freedom the "hands" of supply and demand that drive decisions in a capitalist system.
- Discard the capitalist system entirely and advocate for a command economy managed by impartial controllers who disregard self interest when making decisions about how to deal with scarcity and choice.
Now, it doesn't matter too much to me which approach our nation takes because I'm confident that I'll be successful to a sufficient degree under any of the three. There are pros and cons to all of them. It comes down to what is it one wants to gripe about, not that there is nothing about which to gripe.
It all depends on what family you were born into.
It absolutely does not. One need only look at the literally millions of poor folks who have become middle class or better in the U.S. to see that it does not. The fact is that most people don't come from advantaged families and yet most folks in the U.S. are middle class or higher.
One see from the charts above that most folks are middle or upper income.
That's not the only thing. The
quantity of folks who are upper income also grew. That's very different from the share of folks who were upper income acquiring a greater
proportion of the wealth. What the difference means is that those newly upper income folks had to come from somewhere, and the only places they could have come from is middle and lower income groups. Since the middle income group shrank and the lower income group grew, it stands to reason that most of those newly upper income folks came from the middle class.
One's ability to move from the middle class to the upper income segment of the population is best enabled under capitalism, even constrained forms of it, more so than under any other system. Quite simply,
it's no harder to climb the economic ladder in the United States today than it was 20 years ago. (Click on the link and also see this: "
Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States")
The papers I cited don't agree with populist "hype," but it is original research into exactly the matter at hand. It's hardly the first time the facts that are differ from what folks are being told, even if there are instances of folks for whom the findings are contrary to their personal experiences. The reality is that
folks like to and are more than slightly willing to assume their personal reality is that shared by most other folks, but that need not at all be so. We each have a duty of fairness to find out if our own reality is that of the majority or if it is not before committing to a course of action and thought.
I'm well aware of what the populists are saying. I'm well aware that there are a lot of folks saying it, after all, even a small percentage of the U.S. population is still a lot of people. I'm also fine with doing things to improve those folks' situation, or more accurately, helping them help themselves. What I'm not fine with, that is to say, what I'd prefer we don't do, is alter the general landscape of our capitalist system by injecting/enacting protectionist policies that weaken capitalism's positive attributes while also not head on dealing with the things that are the causes for folks not being successful in a capitalist economy.
How does one become successful in a capitalist economy? By being a capitalist. I'm certain that many folks don't know what that really means or how to be one. And why should they if they grew up in the U.S? The U.S. used to be the nation of "go to school, get a job and work for someone, collect a paycheck and enjoy life." That model does not and will not show folks how to be capitalists. The model that does, and the one seen by folks all over the world is "go to school, go into business for oneself." That is why so many immigrants come to the U.S. and make it. They "get it." They come here because for folks who want to be capitalists -- buyers of land, labor and capital -- the U.S. is the easiest place on the planet to do so.
Why did the "old" model work for so many folks in the 20th century? Quite simply because existing capitalists had huge demands for labor. The whole rest of the "first world" was about to be in a war and in need of fighters not laborers, or they were in a war and in need of fighters not laborers, or they were recovering from a war and needed the materials/goods to rebuild their countries. The U.S. was by far the best place from which to get the goods they needed, be it prosecute a war or to rebuild. During all those years, the U.S. made and exported the stuff that everyone else needed, and because a major war was "just around the corner," the price didn't matter.
These days, who needs the stuff the U.S. can make at the prices we must pay domestically to make it? The answer to that question is U.S. citizens because the whole rest of the world is happy to buy it from makers who can make it less expensively, like those watches I describe, and do so at sufficient quality to meet their needs.
What does the U.S. today have that it overall produces more efficiently (less expensively) than the rest of the world? Intellectual capital, not the physical capital that was it's "edge" in the 20th century. Now the laborers in the U.S. may not like hearing that, but that doesn't make it not so. So what that means is if one insists on working in the U.S. and earning a good living, and one has only physical capital (physical labor) to offer to capitalists, one has little choice, because the system is capitalism, but to tighten one's belt and obtain some intellectual capital, that or find a way to be a capitalist.
I began this section of my post by saying that the family from which one comes doesn't matter. I have to retract that somewhat. I am part owner of my firm. My father is a business owner. My mother was self-employed. Everyone in my immediate family was self-employed all the way back to my first American ancestor who was a fur trader and merchant. So, perhaps being in a family of people who understand what it means to be a capitalist and that will show one how to be one too matters. After all, one can't teach to one's kids what one doesn't know oneself.
Today's workers are disheartened and don't take pride in their work as they did decades ago. With so many factories closed and jobs lost, it is no wonder.
- Assuming one has a job in a factory, what does taking pride in the labor one produces have to do with this topic?
- Why do you say that folks who have those jobs don't take pride in the quality of work they perform?
- What, no matter how high quality be the worker's personal performance, does that worker's work quality have to do with the quality of goods the company has chosen to offer?
