The part I like best about capitalism is that it is proving my decade-old hypothesis that it is destined to fail thanks to a little thing called "human nature". We, as humans, are programmed to accumulate as much as possible... it is in our nature to improve our lot in life. The problem lies in scarcity.
1) For one person to gain, another must lose. This implies that poverty is a necessary requisite to stay competitive and maintain growth.
2) With accumulation comes the resources for further accumulation. This means that it is next to impossible for one born in poverty to live the American dream of working their way through the socioeconomic ranks via hard work and persistence despite what pro-capitalists say.
These reasons are the reason that our poverty rates are increasing while CEOs make record salaries (with bonuses) each year. This is why our economy APPEARS to be doing well while looking at the mean average but when removing outliers the picture presented is far less optimistic. This is why people like Warren Buffett can afford to eat filet mignon and bald eagle eggs for breakfast every morning for doing the same amount of work that a bricklayer who can barely afford to feed his family fried chicken does. Now don't get me wrong... Bill Gates is awesome; he's donating as much or more than most NATIONS to medical research in AIDS and such. Even so... without someone to scrub the toilets what would David Lesar, CEO of Halliburton, be doing with his time? Scrubbing toilets. Each job is just as important as the next and there's no justification for the vast disparity that exists in pay.
Let's look to China who has really come up with an ingenius form of a planned market economy. The government takes control of the economy and molds it to market forces while increases in personal freedoms has gradually come to include increasing amounts of voting rights which will eventually put the general populace in control of the government. Now, I could get into this very deeply but just take my word for it that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP or CPC) is in absolutely no danger right now. China's economic growth has been unprecidented.... depending on who you reference, the average growth ranges anywhere from an unbelievable 8% to an unheard of 11% consistently over the past 30 years and slowed even just slightly as the rest of the Asian economies nearly fell apart in the past 5yrs.
Thinking about it carefully... it all comes down to accountability. We should definitally be allowed freedoms up to the point that our actions impact the lives of another. Now, for individuals this has far reaching implications. For companies, even small that actions a corporation takes impacts the community around them in a very direct way. Therefore, the community should have a say in the actions of the company. This structure would work very much like our current corporate structure: each company would come out with an annual report detailing it's history and plans for the upcoming year related to it's future growth projections and then the people in that company's district would be given the opportunity to vote on the annual report... just like regular corporations except the stakeholders would be district citizens instead of just stockholders.
