Capitalism isn't working and here are the reasons why (opens in new tab)

Seems important to note that the article doesn't seem to be about capitalism per se, but "business-friendly" capitalism as currently practiced in the U.S. and parts of Europe.

In that regard the conclusion (regarding wealth inequality) really isn't that surprising. If the ROI of having money is really higher than the ROI of earning money (i.e. by wages) then the conclusion over time is as simple as the solution to a binary star system containing a black hole... eventually through the iterative process of the economy any given dollar is likely to fall into the basket of the rich guy, and it is much harder to escape that basket than the basket of the poor guy who needs to spend simply to live.

The article doesn't seem to conclude that capitalism is flawed though (at least to the extent that Marxism is called for), but that our actual capitalist system needs corrections made before revolutionary corrects get imposed by force.

If "Capitalism" is defined as "An economy where the most important economic signal, the interest rate, is managed by a private cartel" then no, Capitalism is not working.

This is just re-labeled Marxism, so the usual counter-arguments apply.

(1) Bad data: Most wealth is self-made, not inherited.

(2) Misguided goals: Uneven net wealth gain is better than equal increase of poverty

(3) Magical thinking: Wealth is created by effective systems, it does not appear out of thin air to be distributed

(4) Lack of observation: Government is remarkably poor at wealth management

(5) False sentimentality: A system intent on rewarding the ineffective will have great difficulty being effective itself

(6) Fetishizing hopelessness: Anyone determined already has the opportunity to create scalable wealth-creating systems in a suitable vocation

Capitalism is working.

Statism isn't.

Marx's argument for the inevitability of extreme wealth disparity and at some point a breakdown in the capitalist system is too long to put here, but I can summarize it somewhat. A worker is creating wealth - why else would a company employ him? Let us say he works as a carpenter for a furniture store. He takes $800 worth of wood, nails etc. every day and through his labor makes it into $1000 worth of desks, cabinets etc. What happens with that $1000 in sales? $800 of it goes to buying wood, nails, hammers etc. for the next day. $200 is left over. Some goes to wages to the worker who created the wealth, some goes to profit to the company owners. Let's say it is split down the middle, $100 each way. If the worker works 10 hours a day, he is creating $20 in worth an hour, but only keeping $10 of that. Or you could say he spends the first five hours a day working for himself, and the next five hours he receives none of his own wealth creation, it is expropriated by the capitalists.

What do the capitalists do with their profit? They invest! They buy more capital. They buy capital equipment so that twice as many cabinets and desks can be manufactured in an hour then before. Now, minus the capital cost, with $2000 worth of desks being made a day, with $1600 of daily costs on materials, and keeping the worker at a wage of $100, the capitalist is making $300 a day once his profits pay off the cost of the capital equipment. So the capital spending means a flood of new commodities.

The question becomes - who buys these new commodities? The worker is not going to be buying more desks - he is not making any more than he did before. So then you have "over-production" - too much over-competition, which is not good for capitalists. Marx believed this, but it is not a notion exclusive to Marx - GE CEO Jack Welch has talked about this, as has Peter Thiel, and others. So you get a situation where it is perceived there is a demand for cloud services - so EC2, Linode, Rackspace etc. fund massive capital funding and get into a price war with each other, and people can buy more and more for less and less. There is a ton of capital out there, and demand is not outrageous, so this happens. The bottom line though is the process of profit to capital to more commodities to more profit to more capital to more commodities can't be endless, especially with the consumers wages stagnating. You can get him to get into credit card debt and home mortgage debt and then pass laws saying he can't get out of certain debt and so forth, but this only kicks the can down the road, and makes the inevitable crash worse.

This in a nutshell is one of Marx's major arguments. It is in a nutshell - he wrote more than three large books on this which are difficult to summarize. Replying to thread to argue with one of Marx's ideas is fine, replying to this post because you found some hole in my incredibly condensed argument would be silly - I'm leaving out dozens of caveats which leaves massive holes in my condensed explanation. I have to leave out those caveats or else I'd have to write tens of thousands of more words.

These are interesting articles, especially the 2008 Marxist interpretation of the financial crisis -

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/class-war-and-labors-dec...

http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-...

Even if you disagree with the analysis, the data they point to is, I think, interesting. Liberals and moderates talk about wealth inequality, debt, how finance is dominating the real economy etc. They don't talk about the slowdown in real GDP growth, the decline of industrial capacity utilization etc.

I don't think the wealthy necessarily represent political power. I think corporate lobbyists are more to blame than the ultra wealthy as individuals.

The gist of the problem in my mind is that the closer one is to the source of money (central banks, the Federal Reserve, etc) the more he or she is able to profit from leverage, until the leverage becomes so high that it dwarfs whatever contribution to society that person makes. Whereas the people who are furthest from it survive merely by their own efforts. This video does a good job explaining the origin of money and capitalism:

http://www.hitrecord.org/users/jeffpeff

So what’s happening is that the people who are sitting on vast quantities of wealth, say in the fossil fuel industry, or mining, agriculture, fishing, etc are able to write IOUs and maintain control of their resources in the meantime to compound themselves.

But people who have nothing but the sweat of their brow are unable to obtain capital, because their IOUs can only be cashed in at a speed of 1:1. So people instinctively don’t extend them credit, because they aren’t willing to wait potentially forever to get paid back.

As overall wealth increases, one would like to see individual leverage increase too. So for example if the net worth of the world doubles, people should be able to borrow against the new wealth that’s been created. But the frequent outcome of capitalism is that leverage reaches runaway positive feedback for people at the source, while the majority of the population on the outskirts becomes mired in day to day survival.

So most of the stuff we generally hear about how low taxes stimulate the economy or whatnot are rubbish because they merely raise the slope of the line from top to bottom. If we want to talk about getting the economic gears turning, then we have to start with giving people at the bottom more leverage so they can multiply their efforts.

For a concrete example: one of the key ways we went wrong since the 80s was compound interest. There are other kinds of loans, for example underwriting, where someone buys a horse with the understanding that they will pay back two horse’s worth of grain. They only have the lifetime of the horse to make it happen. If it doesn’t happen, the lender is out a horse and the borrower is out the several years of life it took to fail in the venture. This idea that upon failure the borrower must then also pay back the original loan is nonsense. The lender relies on the fruit of the borrower’s labors to eat (that is, unless he or she is willing to stop lending and eat horses). The price of that free lunch is risk. There used to be codes of dignity, where if people tried hard and failed, the community helped them try again. But if people let their horse die of thirst, they would get thrown in jail. But now we’re so disconnected from one another that these codes have been reworked into “incentives” which don’t accurately reflect how human beings begin ventures by lending or borrowing capital. We accept the reality that 6 billion people in the world are essentially paying compound interest without questioning why we’ve chosen a system like that among many.

I’m thinking that a possible (and probable) alternative to capitalism in the 21st century is going to be non-capital based leverage. So for example if you can install a solar panel on your roof and not have to pay your electric bill, you’ve just increased your leverage by the amount that you used to pay for electricity. The same could happen with food, transportation, even education. I can easily imagine a point where most goods and services are provided through automated means and the average person would have the leisure time and affluence of say, a millionaire today. I use that as a litmus test whenever I hear new ideas in economics or politics and find that generally the approaches being pitched are contrary to what would help everyone across the board.

No Managing Director should earn more than the Prime Minister.

£142,000 per annum - David Cameron

Richard Branson earns that in a little over a week.

The state is to blame, not people exercising their right to trade with each other. What a ridiculous concept.

The problem is that corporate capitalism is a system that delivers the best of both systems (capitalism and socialism) to a well-connected elite and the worst of both to everyone else. For a microcosm, look at commercial air travel. The experience (especially in the lower classes) is Soviet, but the fare-setting (read: price gouging) is hideously capitalistic.

Capitalism generates a set of wealthy people, who pull up the ladder by restricting society to the sorts of capitalism that enhance their wealth, while destroying any variety of business activity that challenges it. That's what we see in the VC-funded world. The VCs have enough capital to kill any fledgling business by funding (or creating, this being the purpose of EIRs) a competitor, but their note-sharing and co-funding makes of them a reputation economy that has more in common with the Politburo than a free-market system.

The problem isn't that capitalism is a bad system. It's that, when you don't have checks and balances that prevent financial and political power being traded for one another, you end up with a corporatist-statist structure rather than a free market. As power concentrates, it only gets worse.