I'm not sure what exactly the consequences of that knowledge should be, but I'm pretty sure it should at least involve not allowing those who have been born in fortuitous (and work ethic and abilities enhancing) circumstances to get so far ahead the less fortunate no longer have a chance to catch up.
You just spit in the face of every "less fortunate" individual who worked harder than everybody else and did catch up. It makes his accomplishment seem rather worthless. After all, he could have simply accepted the charity of someone like you or supported a system where that charity was systematically dispensed. Why bust your ass and work hard?
Oh, that brings me to the next point. Incentives. You just killed any incentive to work hard and bust your ass if you're in the "less fortunate" group. Why bother? You can just wait until someone helps you up.
I find this very troubling. Why should we prevent people from succeeding? I think rather than not allowing people to advance society would be better served by finding ways to help those behind advance. Also, why is it so important to catch up? Why cannot some do well and rise to the top while others do well (for their skill level) and not make it all the way to the top? What is so bad about that?
I’m not saying capitalism doesn’t work, just that as practiced today it’s a mixed bag.
Like democracy. It kind of sucks, and produces people like Silvio Berlusconi. But it still beats the alternatives.
Either you're for a direct command and control structure, you want a mix, or you want free markets. It doesn't matter why you want that, in the end, it boils down to those 3 options.
Self-organizing cooperatives are not anathema to free markets. As long as some jackass somewhere isn't making them mandatory, I think they're fantastic and I'm a Capitalist with a big C. Open source software is a perfect example.
Like you, I'm a Capitalist with a big C. However, I do see it takes some rigorous government intervention to keep free (ish) markets free (ish). If you want to call that government intervention "socialism" then, sure, go ahead, but I'm pretty damn sure evidence points to big C capitalism never having worked as well as it did between 1950 and 1980 in the "western world" where every government, including the US, did its damnedest to keep the capitalists in check to make sure the market would stay as free as possible.
Marx was right. The free market is inherently self-destructive. But it the 100 years since the communist manifesto smart people have figured out ways around that.
Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, etc, all end up like this, where power and control remain with the few.
You can't force or educate out human nature. Self-interest always ramains.
But people keep playing their games. Always looking outside, trying to change the world, rather than within. And they fail, fail, fail, over and over again. Same shit, different flies.
Social democratic systems coupled with vibrant civil societies lead to societies where power, though still distributed unevenly, forms a more interconnected and open network, instead of one centralized institution or small set of institutions that dominates society.
It's a bit unclear, though, which one leads to the other. Or if they're simply the same.
So it will be interesting if in a few years, people start calling themselves unrepentant fascists. Probably the word itself won't be rehabilitated, but you may see more and more people declaring that the Chinese and Russian states provide a better business model than the failed American and European models.
But Russia? Sure, its GDP is impressive, but the vast majority of that is "produced" by oligarchs that are peddling out the country's natural resources without anyone else benefitting. It's a thief-ocracry that makes fascist Italy, Franco Spain and Samoza Portugal look like paradise.
Capitalism is kind of like advanced socialism, since everyone IS compensated based on merit or amount of work, only most people aren't ambitious or want to put in the amount of work that others will (i.e. not everyone wants to "maximize their potential"), therefore creating the inequality.
The exact same happened in the USSR, actually, and what did they do? They just put those uninterested people to work on the same jobs, for the same pay, as those who actually liked working there, and that brought the overall productivity down, because why would anyone work better and faster if the slacker next to him gets paid the same for half the work?
But hey, everybody had jobs, right? Problem solved! :-)
Capitalism would work amazingly well at advancing society/humanity and making individuals wealthy and happy IF every single one of them would want to always maximize their potential and do their best at everything, but sadly that will not happen very soon (or at all)...
