Personally, I like Capitalism, it lets people make money and take care of themselves. Its better than any of the other systems we've come up with so far but it does have its problems. For example, eventually all the money accumulates in a few hands, or how people with less money are most likely to stay that way. There have been different schools of thought on how to fix that issue, for example taxing the rich proportionally to their wealth, government investment in small businesses and things like Universal Basic Income. But those things are always iffy because of tricky things like inflation.
The other day I was reading up on someone's factbook and the idea of unions and collective bargaining being enshrined in their national bill of rights seemed like a genius move in dealing with corporations trying to union bust and break up people from negotiating as a group. Right now the world seems to be going through a financial meltdown, stock market is crashing, housing market is still unaffordable since the Boomer generation, and the minimum wage not only has not kept up with inflation but factually has less buying power than any other time in modern history.
While this is all happening, corporations are reaping in record profits. Maybe if there was a system codefied in law where a certain amount of generated gross profits go directly back to the workers, or that the least earning member in a company is earned proportional to the most earning member, so a high earning CEO HAS to increase pay for everyone else if he or she wants more money, either through bonuses, salary or any other form of income received.
To me I think that would be a way to improve the capitalist system, if the top of the pyramid wants to earn more money, they can only earn as much as a certain ratio compared to the people at the bottom of a company, and any money they receive, everyone else receives a proportional amount. Its frustrating seeing how even though the minimum wage for workers has stagnated to being slightly better than nothing, CEO wages have been running wild, where they've increases thousands of percent over the years in how much a company is willing to pay. That also shows that its better to tax corporations than individuals because people might not be as liquid, people might have most of their assets in property or the stock market. A corporation though, a certain amount of its earnings has to stay liquid.
Another solution would be something like how some nordic countries invest their national trading surplus into some sort of Investment, where the returns end up being paid out to everyone.
I believe we're at a turning point in the Capitalist system, where never before has so much been horded by the few. We are coming up with ways where the money that is considered excessive is being taxed and returned into working people and being made to circulate into the economy again. I'm tired of people bashing Capitalism, its got its problems but being poor under capitalism is infinity better than being poor under any other economic model. *cough* communism *cough*
So instead of going backwards and adopting a previous inefficient system, how about we talk about what a post-end stage capitalistic economic system might look like? One thats egalitarian, that uses the excess of the profits generated by the rich to support those at the bottom AND to come up with a system where people are being paid a REAL Living Wage instead of the least amount of money they can legally pay you. Thats what I want, pay me more proportionally for the amount of money Im making you! It seems like nowadays if you work hard and put in the hours, some day your boss can finally buy that dream car he or she always wanted. We've been conditioned by society to work hard to make others rich, instead of working hard to make ourselves rich, and I think the next step for us as a society is to figure out how to get corporations to pay their workers in relation to their gross profits. That way, when the company you work for is doing well, you also get more.
