To just say “capitalism” is making people healthier, wealthier, and live longer is naive. Which kind of capitalism? Late liberal democratic consumer capitalism? Capitalism brings many people up levels of economic stability but to do this it also has to ensure that certain masses stay at certain levels. Another question we have to ask is who is “capitalism” making healthier, wealthier, and live longer? The people in Darfur–who are being slaughtered? My friends in Zambia whose life expectancy is 35? Or perhaps, my friend in Kenya who works a commercial farm, run by Westerners, and gets paid $10 a week? Is it helping them? Or is it helping us who already have so much sh*t that we have to spend more just to entertain ourselves?
Is capitalism a success when a billion people die from eating too much unhealthy food produced by the forces of its mechanisms, while, another billion die from not having enough food?

i disagree, Sam. Free markets don’t demand poverty and I do accept that their spread has helped reduce material poverty. Free markets include immigration and moving jobs where they are most efficiently done, as well as disparate accumulations of wealth.. As far as I’m concerned anyone who claims to be for liberty and free markets has to quit complaining about open borders and other people’s choices.

Doug, I agree with you.
The poorest countries in this world invariably have the most un-free economies. It is also a fallacy to assume that free-market capitalism is inherently exploitative. Does exploitation occur? Yes, it occurs in any economic system however in a free-market, people at least have the ability (I’m not saying it is easy) to escape a bad situation or a dead-end job.
In the end, free-market capitalism is a system that allows people to dream dreams, aim for the stars, and improve their situation, which ultimately benefits society as a whole. Adam Smith was correct and Karl Marx was wrong.

Probably the most full-blooded free market capitalism ever practiced was in the second half of the 19th century in Britain and America. It is certainly true that great wealth was produced, and equally true that the benefits of this wealth were distributed very unequally. I doubt that many in the spinning mills of Lowell or the ‘rookeries’ of London felt they had much chance of realizing their hopes and dreams, or reaching for the stars. The capitalist economies of the developed world, of which the UN report takes note, are heavily regulated corporate welfare states, far from the free market conceptions of Adam Smith, and equally far I should say from the vision of Karl Marx. If these economies have increased human welfare it is due to the activities of social reformers, organized labor, and the practical wisdom and sense of justice of the ordinary working people acting through democratic representatives, as well as the creativity and productivity of corporations and individuals.
I should make special mention here of the significant role in social reform played by Christian preachers and authors such as William Stead and Charles Sheldon. The Social Gospel played a part in tempering the rapaciousness of 19th century capitalism, and in confronting the problem posed by a huge, vulnerable, property-less industrial working class. They called into question the relationship between wealth and virtue, and reminded the country that Jesus, a carpenter’s son, had preached love, compassion and sharing, not the single-minded individualistic pursuit of entrepreneurial success. We could use a few more of these guys today!
What you always see is that governments and business cry free market when they think it will benefit them, but run behind the skirts of protectionism when they feel threatened. Case in point- American agriculture. Still, the hybrid system of capitalism coupled with a strong dose of active government oversight and regulation—and a redistributionist philosophy— seems to have done all right, and to be the most that is politically feasible in the developed world.

Skipchurch these are different times and I agree with your last paragraph but for me the solution is our default policy should be no tax, no tariff no regulation and a very good, clear and transparent reason for any deviation. Mind you, that’s how I vote. What I expect is thievery by workers, lawyers and businessfolk supported by protectionism, regulations and border enforcement.
One of my favorite political quotes is from Adam Smith. I don’t have time to look up the exact words but the substance is that businessmen cry fervently for open markets and yet two cannot share a table without conspiring against the public.

Doug, I guess you are content to do without pure food and drug regulation,the SEC, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, interstate highways, the Coast Guard, national parks, regulations against sweat shops-child labor-etc, the Centers for Disease Control, etc etc… things that most people value as federal government services and would never ever be sacrificed to get no taxes & no regulation.
Don’t think I’m not sympsthetic– I was a Cato Institute supporter for years and years, from it’s inception. Now that might be because I like o see a certain type of conservative to get hammered from the libertarian side! But be that as it may… And I like Ron Paul in a perverse kind of way. I very much WANT these libertarian ideas out there all the time. I WANT individual liberty to be a keystone of our political thinking. What I grow in my garden is my business. But the bottom line is that the libertarian utopia is so far from having any political reality as to be almost a kind of crackpotism in the mind of most voters. So I think those with a libertarian bent have to accommodate to that reality.
If I read you right, you see– as I do– a kind of anti-democratic Big Government Authoritarianism as the biggest peril. That, and a political elite seemingly devoid of principles of any kind whatsoever.

Uh, no Skipchurch. Default doesn’t mean universal. I am troubled that so little is done to measure the benefit of government programs, to debate whether their goals can’t be done better either by private citizens or even by a refocussed government. I’m not a pure libertarian, I just don’t trust the political process enough to say “We want X so let’s pass a law mandating that and start a department to insure people follow the law.
In government there’s a rarely used technique called zero-based budgeting. The process as I understand it is you imagine the world without whatever you’re budgeting for, then imagine what the entity would do with half the most recent budget, then imagine what you would do fully funded and then, maybe, imagine what you would do with more money. That’s the kind of thinking I trust as compared to the liberal-conservative spectrum which seems currently based on the idea that if something bad happens anywhere you need a law against it and a department of it-prevention and punishment.
On your third paragraph, that’s pretty true although I’m no populist either.

Doug, zero-based budgeting is something I’ve ‘in theory’ been through in a state agency– at the agency level only. And it does create a framework in which some of the more absurd things can be given the heave-ho.But as always in organizations, the entrenched interests and little bureaucracies are very adept at preserving their turf. Any kind of cost/benefit analysis seems to come up against endless debate about one side of the equation or the other. I could tell you stories…but we all have them. Large organizations just proliferate this sort of nonsense.
Then too the electorate, or ‘stakeholders’, or whatever they’re called in the particular case, are no more decisive. Everyone wants everything, and nobody much wants to pay for it.

Skipchurch, I was just at a “stakeholder meeting” exactly as you’ve described in Sacramento on Friday. This is the kind of thing that confirms my basic conservatism. People who need help deserve help and ought to get help, but any help that can be given by someone other than a government or law has a better shot. For the rest, ok, government.
I think the main thing is this: change is never made by consensus and politics is a vampire gouging the throat of good intentions.