There’s a reason non-capitalist nations are so poor
and have populations that are miserable, and why capitalist nations are wealthy
and comfortable. The reason capitalism is successful anywhere it’s tried is
that the money that makes manufacturers and small businesses wealthy is earned by them. This also applies to the
employees of corporations who also earn
the money they make as employees and the money they earn as investors in a capitalist environment. A non-capitalist
nation confiscates the little its people have in order to function based on the
nation’s valueless local currency.
When a capitalist “earns”
his or her wealth, it’s a result of the open and willing exchange of what the
consumer has (money) in exchange for what the capitalist has (goods or
services). Because of this free and willing exchange, capitalist nations create
value whereas non-capitalist nations have nothing but worthless paper currency
and poor, starving citizens.
This is not to say that Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, didn’t make a valid and
necessary point about companies that cheat or mistreat their employees and customers,
because his book stressed that point loud and clear. Bad companies may be sued
for their misbehavior and may be regulated and put out of business if they don’t
do the right thing by their customers. A government will most often not allow
itself to be sued, so there’s no way of punishing government abuses, while
corporations must conform or go out of business.
The government neither makes nor earns anything, it
merely takes, via taxation. If it takes too much in the way of taxes it can
hurt itself, because the earners it takes from can leave the country or intentionally
earn less in order to decrease the tax burden the government imposes. For most
of America’s history the government conformed to the United States constitution
and did the necessary things listed in that document to preserve the national
union, and as a result needed only enough money to fund the constitutional
things assigned to it. Lately, however, government is increasing taxes to pay
for things that are not necessary and not allowed by the constitution, and as a
result it needs more and more money to pay for these unconstitutional things. Taxes
are going up for all Americans who are earners, especially the wealthiest
Americans.
To prove that our government knows that they, via unconstitutional
practices and policies, have been killing the goose that laid the golden egg,
they have for some time been planning how they can get their hands on our 401Ks
and IRAs, because the stocks and bonds represented by these and other privately
held funds are the only source of real value left in America. The value of
these stocks and bonds was earned by
the corporations they represent. Government bonds, on the other hand, are
worthless in any real sense, and only hold value as long as the government
remains solvent, which is dicey in the present world of increasing government
debt that knows no bounds and is on a trajectory to the stars. This government confiscation
plan is an admission by our rulers that the capitalist system, in creating value
and worth, works and is necessary if we want to continue our pleasant lives,
and it’s an admission that a government that doesn’t abide by the rules and
insists on controlling its citizens’ lives and disobeying the constitution, is
a failure.
It requires a democracy and a free populace to have a
capitalist society. The success of Apple,
as a trendy example of the corporate world, proves the point: the government
would never have thought to create the iPad or iPod, which people all over the
world want and buy, and which products make Apple a wealthy company, which in
turn makes their employees wealthy and also in turn makes their customers happy
(and also wealthy if they, as an exercise of their freedom, invested in Apple
stock). The success and increasing wealth of Apple also benefits the government
because of the increasing wealth of the company and all of those customers and
employees who benefit from its wealth. All governments can do for income is
take money from citizens who work and invest, via taxation. Government doesn’t generate wealth (except for
politicians on the take like Harry Reid, et al) and government doesn’t make
people happier by giving them the things they want (unless they are on welfare,
and even then one cannot say that these takers are “happy” with their
barely-making-it welfare checks, their boring, wasteful lives and their government-issued
Obamaphones). The possessions in peoples’ lives have to be earned by the individual in
order to make them happy. The more
government takes from the earners, the less the entire population has in the
way of wealth, and as government grows and taxes more heavily, it also deprives
its citizens of liberty, which spikes unhappiness rather quickly.
As companies like Apple become burdened with
increasing taxes they may stop expanding and their investors may begin to disappear.
And as regulations on their products and their methods of manufacturing are
imposed on them (as Obama’s EPA is currently doing to all industries in
America), they stop innovating, expanding and hiring and everyone suffers,
including the greedy government as fewer taxes are paid by investors and
employees.