I, however, marvel at the other consistent result of all these polls, which these people don’t seem nearly as interested in talking about. I refer to the ratings Americans give to capitalism. They’re terrible. A big Gallup poll from last fall is representative. Socialism won the approval of 39 percent, while capitalism’s positive number was 54 percent.
From the founding of the country until the stock market crash of 1929, the general belief was that government should be small and markets should not be regulated. Some people say it worked pretty well until 1929, but in fact that isn’t true. It worked well enough to perpetuate itself, because if capitalism is anything it’s elastic and dynamic, but that’s about it.
After the Great Depression hit, Franklin Roosevelt hired a few thousand cops to police this beat, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and other entities that kept an eye on Wall Street. Human nature being what it is, this did not create a nirvana, but it improved matters considerably.
Fourth—and this is as important as the first three but isn’t mentioned as often—he cracked down on monopoly power. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson created antitrust enforcement, but FDR really amped it up. In addition, his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights contained eight provisions. Most of them were rights he wished to confer upon people simply for being born: an adequate wage, a good education, decent health care. But one right was directed specifically at owners of businesses: “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”
Today? Capitalism is badly broken. At least four big things are wrong.
Second, monopoly power today is wildly out of control. And monopoly power, as FDR knew, is a complete bastardization of capitalism. It kills competition. It stifles shared prosperity. It gives rise to cronyism, corruption, and robber barons. These fraud-idiot free marketeers who bomb us with their propaganda and sing the praises of Adam Smith ought to take 10 minutes to go read about what an inveterate foe of monopoly Smith was. The damage done on this point to our country by Milton Friedman and Robert Bork (among others) is enormous, far greater than any socialist could inflict in his wildest dreams.
Ready? It was $13.9 billion. Today, as we all know, he briefly became the world’s first trillionaire, although I guess it depends on the day. That is sick. There is no other word for it. The same thing has happened with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and so many others. Their fortunes have increased tenfold or more in the past decade. They constitute an oligarchy that is gaining more political power every year.
Should people with iPhones pay more than Android users for food delivery? Should delivery drivers earn different amounts for the same job, based on personal information the app has about them? Do we want nurses who staff shifts at hospitals bidding against each other for work, competing over who will accept the least amount of money? Should people who live in certain zip codes be charged more for online test prep? What about single parents?
I believe capitalism has two compelling qualities that make it, to borrow from Churchill, less bad than all the other economic “-isms.” The first is that at its best, it fosters healthy competition. The old Econ 101 textbook thing about the guys starting shoe stores on opposite corners is, or should be, true. The one who offers a better product at a better price will thrive, and consumers will benefit. The other guy needs to go find something else to do, but that’s life, and usually, in a balanced economy that offers ample opportunity, he will.
We do have competition and innovation in the United States today. But we could have a lot more of both if we had the right people in office passing the right laws. What we mostly have is system in which hard-working middle-class people are feeling more and more left behind, and in which young people in particular see very little opportunity and are convinced that Social Security, the crown jewel of United States public policy, won’t exist when they hit 67. And that is why socialism is gaining in popularity.
Anyone who’s interested in stopping socialism needs to work on fixing capitalism. If we had a more humane capitalism in which workers made a solid wage; in which basic health care was a right and was free or at least affordable; in which the government was investing in the small towns where opportunity has vanished; in which those kids in Appalachia and Detroit and New Mexico were given the tools they need to fulfill their potential; in which the very rich were appropriately taxed; if we had these things, socialism wouldn’t be so popular.
Any foe of socialism who doesn’t see this and isn’t working to change capitalism just isn’t a serious person. If the form of capitalism that we have now in this country continues unchecked and unchanged, socialism’s popularity will rise and rise. In this sense, the uber-capitalists and all those who ignore these deformities are dooming themselves, perpetuating a system that … well, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Didn’t a famous guy once say that?
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