"You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world."
Milton Friedman
When many people throw around the word "capitalism," they do so probably not understanding what the word means in an economic sense.
It does NOT mean money, or the accumulation thereof.
Capital is something that improves productivity. Productivity is defined as output/man hour.
If my company utilizes mechanical equipment to produce a road, it will do so quicker, more cleanly, with less waste and with a better final product than a company that utilizes man power and shovels. And no matter how many men that other company employs! And my company will, therefore, be employed to build more and more roads, requiring more and more equipment, and more and more skilled operators to handle the increased demand. We will ALL get richer! And so will the communities around us that we serve as they are able to move about more quickly providing their goods and services to others in the community.
Why has the west grown rich? Because its inhabitants are smarter, stronger, better educated, and better able to make money and improve living standards?
Of course not!
The west has grown rich, and the United States has been the city on the hill, a beacon demonstrating how, because it chose a political system (liberty) that best matched the economic system (free-market economics) to produce that wealth and living standard. We have employed the development of capital - or CAPITALISM!
AND SINCE THE INCEPTION OF THE COMBINATION OF THOSE TWO SYSTEMS HAVE COME "LEADER" AFTER "LEADER" TRYING TO TAKE THOSE LIBERTIES AWAY CHIP BY CHIP AND CHANGE THE FREE-MARKET INTO A POLITICALLY CONTROLLED ONE!
We are experiencing just such a struggle at this very moment in this country's history. We are "led" by a committed socialist, who might be better described as a colonial African, who really does intend to change this country's economic system into something else altogether -- something that WON'T work. THAT was the dream of his father - the destruction of the United States and its economy. Will this system he seeks succeed? Has it succeeded anywhere at any time? Of course not!
The richest 8 or 10 countries in the world, those with the best living standards and which produce the most wealth for its people, are those with economic systems that are the closest to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations concept, circa 1776, of an invisible hand guiding voluntary exchange and the distribution of produced goods and services. The 150 or so countries with the least economic output and the lousiest standards of living are those dictatorships with economic systems the furthest from Adam Smith's model.
So why the struggle to actively take this country, the United States, away from the economic model that made it so strong and so great? The word was used above - CONTROL.
And don't think for a minute that is not the objective...
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