When I read opinion pieces like this I always look for the weakest link that indicates the level of understanding of the author. Here is the one I found for this article:
"Capitalism maximizes the incentive for productive work, and, in turn, optimizes competition to produce the greatest quality and competence from those who engage in this competition — driving the best to society."
In an ideal, Adam Smith world this would be a great goal. But we don't live in that world. The capitalism we experience today is not like that. There are competitive sectors, such as consumer electronics, which produces great innovation and quality products. But most of the economy is run by predatory, monopoly capitalism, in which competition is suppressed, leading to excess wealth entrapment by the owners, since they can set prices and quantity to maximize profit. And, no, monopoly is not the benign system that the author pretends it to be. In a competitive capitalism, over the long run profits are zero. Under monopoly capitalism, monopoly capture of wealth is the point.
This piece is so full of laughter-curve propaganda that I can't cover them all. It's reliance on continually throwing out fears of the USSR or Venezuela shows the lack of reality and seriousness. Nobody is proposing to enact such systems here. But they make for great fake bogeymen.
But all you have to do to prove how wrong the author is is to look at the results. Start at the year 1975. The US was not a socialist nation then. But ever since the Powell memo in 1971 the effort has been to transfer the fruits of labor from a roughly fair distribution between capital and labor to one in which capital takes all growth and leaves labor to stagnate. In 2020 500 capitalists increased their net wealth by $2 trillion, which is more than the income that half of Americans together, 165 million, will earn in their entire lifetimes. If the distribution of income had remained similar to what it was in 1975, $50 trillion of US income would have gone to improve the lives of the vast majority of the country. Instead it was siphoned off into the personal accounts of the richest 1%.
These results are not because of capitalism, per se. They are because capitalism is sick, it has been captured by a small group of investors whose goals are to take as much as they can grab, who will use their wealth to buy political power, and use that political power to further transfer wealth and income from the public to themselves, in a never-ending, self-destructive loop. Talking about the good things that capitalism has done in the past, or trying to turn the term “socialism” into a scary monster based on what occurred in the past in other parts of the world, completely ignores the American reality we are living in today.
