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Originally Posted by StumpyPete
I would agree, however there are many people who believe that the French wouldn't recognise hard work if it walked up to them in the street. Don't forget this is the country with the 35 hr week enshrined in law.
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There used to be similar laws here in the US with a 40 hour work week. It used to be required of companies to pay time and a half for overtime. But those laws were all eliminated in the 1980s and 1990s. Just a coincidence that wages declined over that same period?
Capitalism, by design, causes the upward flow of money. If you were to have the perfect capitalist system, it would fail by its own merrits as eventually there would be no middle class, and every industry would develop a monopoly or trust. By theory, eventually one individual would own the entire world, although who knows how long it would take to reach that stage.
The reason there has never been such a failure is that people revolt long before they all starve to death. In countries where the government has kept a complete 100% hands-off approach, the wealth inequality has reached a point where the people have revolted. Most of your socialist revolutions were in countries where such was the case -- huge wealth inequality where a few were rich and everyone else poor.
In the US, between 1900 and 1980, steps were taken by the government to balance the capitalist system with socialist policies in order to keep a steady and healthy middle class. Examples of these socialist policies are a progressive income tax, welfare, labor laws including a minimum wage, bankruptcy laws, social security, etc. But since 1980, the trend has been for these laws to slowly be repealed or weakened.
The progressive income tax that used to be 91% for the top tax bracket, was lowered to 75%, and then 70%, and then 50%, and then 35%. The current president wants to raise it to 39%, and he is being called a socialist and this is being presented to the American people as if the progressive income tax is a new socialist policy. America has traditionally had a progressive income tax that was much more progressive than it was today. And if memory serves me right, our economy and middle class was extremely healthy between 1946 and 1962 when the top tax bracket was 91%.
If you are in favor of darwinism and believe that a few select individuals should be extremely wealthy and everyone else poor, then pure 100% capitalism is indeed for you -- the kind Adam Smith wrote about. But know that there is no political democracy without economic democracy, and we might as well go back to a monarchy and live like the peasants did in the 16th century when there was pure hands-off capitalism.