The United States – Capitalism at its Worst

As an economic system, capitalism has been responsible for a multiplicity of benefits including encouraging technological and industrial advancement, inspiring innovation, increasing the standard of living for the citizens of the United States and contributing to overall national prosperity. 

However, in the current era these advances have been overshadowed by the current American version of capitalism that seems to be apparently devoid of any sense of responsibility to humanity or the human condition. A system that is exemplified in the words of Elon Musk who stated, "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." Although he later went on to attempt to mollify this position, his actions in relation to his role in scuttling US AID in cohort with President Trump and other actions in which he showed a characteristically careless disregard for the human cost for his behavior certainly validates his original statement. He is not alone in this attitude, and, as a matter of fact, it is shared by many of the nation’s richest individuals who possess an alarming share of the nation’s wealth. A system whose primary goal is the making of extraordinary profit and rewards corporate leadership with vast fortunes. A system geared to satisfying the apparently unbounded greed of stockholders to the extent that the manufacture of cigarettes – a known killer of many consumers – is seen as a worthwhile investment as well as the highly technological production of weapons of mass destruction. All done in the name of profit. 

In this variant of capitalism as practiced in the United States, the current statistics in regard to the national quality of life in regard to personal longevity, the status of access to adequate healthcare, childcare, infant mortality, homelessness, poverty and higher education is abysmal – the actual standing of the United States in these areas in regard to other so-called prosperous nations is at the very bottom. 

 As this is happening, it has been reported in 2007 that the top 20% of Americans owned 86% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 80% owned 14%. This data is a real and frightening aspect of modern-day America as defined by capitalism as it is currently being practiced. 

The saddest aspect of all of this is that this system has created an extraordinary degree of unnecessary suffering as experienced by so many individuals and families and will ultimately fail for it is in fact unsustainable in its current form. We can do better than this.