No One is "Entitled" to Anything, but that's not the point ...

[skyroom80]

A great article I read in Newsweek, You Say You Want a Revolution,, compares the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street in that both extremes are shouting their disenfranchisement with government and demanding a reckoning. I disagree that Tea Partyists have any kind of workable answer but, yes, even I can realize that two such divergent groups have

Comments

[ragnarok20]

Uh, yeah, I know it's not a free-market. I'm pretty sure that was implied in my statement with words like "mercantilism" and "corporate cronyism."

Capitalism and free-markets, however, are not synomymous.At the risk of being misunderstood, I am not a capitalist. Instead, I advocate the free market. Capitalism is a specific economic arrangement with reference to the ownership of property and capital. It happens to be the arrangement I prefer because I believe it is more just, a far better reflection of reality and produces more prosperity than the alternatives. But I wouldn’t crusade for capitalism the way I would crusade for freedom of speech. What I would crusade for is a free market in which individuals exchange or co-operate with each other according to their own choices. - Wendy McElroy, http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.1321

However, even under capitalist models in the free-market, one would see a greater distribution of wealth. Free-markets would allow more firms, creating more jobs (thus higher wages), and more goods constituting substitutes thus increasing the supply and lowering costs. The result is that less money is coming out of the people's pockets into those of many more people. What we have is the inverse relationship in our considerably "less-than-free" market where the markets are choked so that there are fewer firms, fewer jobs (lower wages) and fewer substitutes (higher costs) such that more money is coming from the pockets of more people and into those of fewer thus creating the distribution of wealth we currently have.