To me, it appears as if you were misreading my earlier post and my use of the word capitalist. I used the word capitalist to refer to persons holding capital.
Yes. But a person holding capital might also be a machinist putting money into a pension for his later years.
So I was NOT specifically criticizing capitalism with my employment of the term capitalist and my description of what seems to have been a major problem in the united states's allowances regarding the capitalists. Also, NOT all capitalists have been able to suck all the surplus value - such as the smaller businesses are stuck attempting to compete and putting up their capital and their risk and then getting screwed by the overall poor business and poor humanity infrastructure in the USA.
IN the USA, you tend to make more money by being a dickhead, rather than by being responsible - even though there are some examples of responsible companies, such as Costco, who treat their workers relatively well, and Costco still is rewarded in the market place. Wallmart is rewarded in the market place, but treat their workers like shit, and deserve to be regulated into a better state of business, humanity and state of responsibility.
So again, it's not really capitalism per se. Just clarifying because I feel it's important.
Richy_T...
I get the sense that we would agree about a lot of the criticisms of the current system, and surely I am NOT opposed to responsible capitalism nor responsible capitalists. Some of our bones of contention seem to come when we get into describing solutions or if we attempt to paint too broadly with solutions. We also may agree about some of the solutions, if we were to take them one by one. It is much too difficult to get into painting broad solutions in a forum like this and through a variety of short written posts.
Though I do tend to agree with one of the points above made by Octaft that removing some of the distractive and corruptive nature of money in politics would likely go a long ways towards moving us in the right direction. I think that movements can be made in that direction, so I would NOT throw my hands up in the air regarding those kinds of potential measures to remove or to lessen the impact of the money in politics matters.