Whatever Brett says serves the purpose of trolling to keep republicans in power.
The chosen method of the day, the Party Line, is Democrats versus capitalist freedom and Brett faithfully serves the Party.
It is an idiotic distinction that exists only as it is one of the few ploys left to the oligarch fascists.
I await all the Brett columns on the Lemon socialism that defines the American oligopoly and the capture of the state by oligopolistic through means such as the federalist society cult.
I will await forever because Brett will not write those columns. He is loyal to the Party and to his self anointed superior human lording over his lessers status.
But it is not like he hides it. And the Times wants him to do it.
45
"The United States is the world’s most competitive economy, as well as the wealthiest...None of this should be difficult to celebrate. [Such] [a]n economy...will, over time, generate more wealth... and distribute [it] far more widely — than any form of central planning."
Wow, Mr. Stephens, you are so right about what the richest economy on earth can do!
For instance, did you know the number of U.S. infants who died before their first birthday went down 14% between 2005 and 2015!
I bet pretty soon - well, "over time," anyway, as you say - yea, I bet "over time" we won't have the worst infant morality out of 20 other rich nations.
"[D]ifficult to celebrate"? Not for this free market loving patriot! Yay, American capitalism, huh Mr. Stephens!!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/08/health/child-mortality-rates-by-country-study-intl/index.html
22
Most successful economic system????
China went from poor, agrarian 3rd World country to powerhouse competitive with the US in 30 years.
Russia, also agrarian and poor, suffered through two world wars horribly and developed a space program and oil industry competitive with the rest of the world.
In the same period, the US fought wars to promote freedom for capitalism to exploit without resistance, screw the world’s working population, and lost trillions of dollars in capital in the process, precipitating its now rapid decline and collapse.
Get your facts straight, Mr. Stephens.
33
Socialism shouldn’t be a dirty word, either, but apparently it is to wealthy capitalists, who never learned to share their toys. Just as the uber-rich and the wannabes are threatened by those who asked for an equitable distribution of wealth, so that a higher standard of living can be obtained by all, many of us are threatened by blatant capitalism with its dog-eat-dog-and-the-hell-with-the-rest-of-you ethos. Not the country I envision America to be. Any longer. If it ever was.
33
Please, this is so silly. All these labels and handwringing over moderate versus progressive versus socialist versus capitalist versus versus . . . . As if life is lived in a straight jacket of labels and we don't need to think -- like our voting, just straight party ticket and you don't have to worry about those pesky policy differences.
If we had gone down a reasonable path these past decades (say, Gore instead of Jr.) and not followed the lunatic right (who are more activist than any caffeine fueled progressive), then todays 'radical' policy would actually be a 'moderate' policy. And all this is meaningless.
What most can agree on:
1.) we are in a big mess on big issues such as climate change, health insurance, inequality, etc.
2.) Congress has worsened this mess by ignoring real problems, chasing straw dogs, and arguing over its own labels
3.) these problems are urgent and become more so with each passing day
4.) who cares what label is used as long as we have workable solutions. It's been a long long time since Congress (GOP in particular) has put forth ANY solution for any of our problems.
We have screwed the upcoming generation so badly, and they are the ones now bringing all the new energy into politics. Let them call it whatever they want, because capitalism as it exist has failed them miserably. They are the ones that are going to have live with the solutions created today. What do we care what it is called?
24
Stephens's comments are quite macro/general. He further focuses only on what he likes and ignores everything else. (He does the same thing with Israel.) Capitalism has not been a wealth-producing machine for the majority of residents on this planet. Half of all long-term capital-gains taxes are paid by the top %0.1, because those with north of $10M in income are the only ones who can afford to hold on to equities that long, if at all. %70 of said taxes are paid by the top %1. .... Recall as well that employees of 1990s dot.coms were granted large stock options that became toilet paper.
And, of course, not one word from Stephens about capitalism destroying the planet. The power of the Fourth Estate lies not in what it tells us, but in what it refuses to tell us. Wouldn't it have been nice, for example, if the Fourth Estate had figured out that the young girl who talked us into invading Kuwait with stories of supposed atrocities by Iraqi troops was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti amassador to the United States.
Bret Stephens is today's Bill Safire. If you liked Bill, Bret is your guy.
I did not enjoy Bill Safire. His famous book is riddled with factual errors.
18
Good God ... how hard is it to look at Germany and see one of the most successful economies in the world? Mixed Capitalism ... which means elements of socialism. Strong unions seen as partners, great schools, educated and well paid workers, abundant and decent housing, commitment to 80% renewable energy, excellent and low-cost healthcare, great roads and infrastructure. An economy of fairness and regulation, government committed to truth and transparency, leaders of character and integrity
I mean ... what is so damn hard about pointing to Germany?
We have an economy that still has 80% living paycheck to paycheck. No savings, no benefits, no healthcare, no pension. Many are working full time and are still homeless.
CEOs making millions. Politicians are purchased. Big corporations paying NO taxes.
Do you think we can maybe fix our brand of capitalism to look more like Germany's brand?
63
I’m the swing vote everyone wants. I lean right fiscally and I lean left on most other issues. I can say unequivocally that if presented a choice between Trumpism and Statism (AOC, Bernie, Warren) I will hold my nose and vote Trump every time. If democrats want my vote they should stop celebrating things like the Amazon HQ2 NYC debacle and admit they overplayed their hand.
If the only platform on the left is “soak the rich” and “corporations are evil” please don’t be surprised by Trump’s re-election.
I just wish Bret had a daily column to bring NYT readers back to the center (i.e reality).
158
@Jason: If you would vote for Trump over Warren then clearly "most other issues" mean nothing to you. As Joe Biden put it, "Don't tell me what you value; show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."
84
@Richard Schumacher that’s not quite fair.
I’m giving Democrats the roadmap on how to get my vote. If they are intent on burning the system to the ground because we have more billionaires than other countries, I say don’t be surprised by the outcome in 2020.
I’m offering a dose of reality to the bubble that seems to be the NYT comments section.
Pragmatism and compromise from the center can capture my vote. Labels, soak the rich policies, tax and spend without thought - that’s how dems lose elections because people like me (moderate view business owners) run the other way.
58
Brett, Is the military “socialist”? Why do you hate the military?
14
If capitalism is great, why does big business insist upon socialism for itself?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
23
From what I see, Dems don't disavow capitalism (although Republicans pretend that they do). They just want to make sure the "winners" in capitalism are not doing so based on gaming the system - privatizing gains while socializing costs, or benefiting one group (those already rich) at the expense of those trying to get there.
And I'm not as confident as you are that the economy and peace that Trump inherited will continue through 2020. If there's a chance to bungle it, the "very best people" in Trump's Administration are likely to screw it up.
32
Sadly, the Democrats are lining themselves up in a circular firing squad. Would that there was a process to weed out the field of every Tom, Dick, & Harriet before throwing one's hat in the ring. Why not have an internal debate to choose a few candidates instead of this very messy primary where no one will be able to cleanly separate oneself from the crowd? Whoever manages to emerge as the opponent to Trump will be unnecessarily damaged. One can 9nly hope they are not damaged beyond all hope.
7
Liz Mair to Dems--"don't abandon Fox news". Now Bret telling Dems what words to use.
These Rkon columnists sure have a lot of advice for the party they are trying to undermine.
These writers don't add balance to the NYT because they constantly attack Dems, rather than present arguments to support their views. Truth is--there is no defense for Rkon corruption. See today's article on Sen McTurdle.
Jesus reportedly advised--stop swallowing the camel before you complain about someone else coughing on a nat.
6
In all articles that ‘talk of’ socialism, the author should define what he understands by socialism. Marx’s definition, from the “Critique of the Gotha Program” is “To each according to his contribution” whereas Lenin defined it as “State’s ownership of the means of production”.
Marx’s definition is more about distribution and compensation. Capitalism to them is where the source of compensation is unearned income (money working for money) like cap gains, carried interest etc. IRS defines unearned income as Marx would!
AOC is fighting for (if you parse her tweets looking for a deeper philosophy) some definition of “to each according to his contribution” (butt working for money) and taxation on unearned income. And that is socialism by Marx’s definition of the term.
Society can have parts of both. We all know 100% socialism (no 401K) and unchecked capitalism are both bad ideas.
How Marx would define entrepreneurship of today is a matter of debate, however, most would settle down defining an entrepreneur as a ‘petite-bourgeoisie’.
John Hickenlooper is a poster child of American Entrepreneurship. He earned his every cent. He received “according to his contribution”.
[Off Topic: I knew about some tech firms where the Principal Engineer earned more than the CEO. Who contributes more?]
7
The chryon under Hickenlooper’s interview should have read, “What a stupid gotcha question from that smug know-it-all, Joe Scarborough.”
17
Subsidizing great wealth by legislation is the end of capitalism in favor of plutocracy. You need to read capital theory from its origins in Adam Smith: unregulated lending without punishment for offending isn’t capitalism but naked greed. Nobody went to prison for the greatest swindle in economic history, the recession W Bush created by the stupidest laws ever written, those that permitted rating and insuring agencies to invest in the products they rated and insured. So long as Republican lackeys remain in charge of laws and regs capitalism fails the smell test. Consider the ecological disaster Trumpsters have created in only two years, undoing nearly four decades of environmental protection. On behalf of the Koch and Murcers and Bob Murrays of the world, wealthy white trash who spend half a billion dollars every election cycle promoting climate change denial, a theme as dishonest and pernicious as Holocaust denial.
26
Well, your idea of capitalism may need some fine tuning as well. Nothing wrong with having a social democracy that works for everybody. But not the capitalism in vogue today, with a persistent odious economic inequality, and a real remnant of slavery in the form of segregation ( in jobs, housing, education, health care, you name it). I have the distinct impression that the corporate world, the 'rich and powerful', do not look at democratic values with love, nor happy with providing an adequate safety net for those left behind (and of no fault of their own). You see, a free market 'a la Milton Friedman', with poor public checking and with no sensible regulation, and with no ethical pragmatism, invites our basest impulses to gain ahold, namely selfishness and greed. The beauty of capitalism is that it is based on 'creative destruction', where fair competition allows the exclusion of companies that may be effective but not efficient enough to remain competitive; and the risks inherent in trying to make it, and the talent and effort involved; but even then, the need of serendipity to be in the right place at the right time, and with the infrastructure we all contributed to be at work. If capitalism is allowed to screw the majority it may be worse than socialism as depicted. I trust you know the difference but in these Trumpian times it is difficult to trust we are prudent enough to make it work for each and everyone. A chain is never stronger than it's weakest link, right?
15
I'm positive without reading a single other comment that this op ed will not resonate with most NYT readers. Too bad.
23
Republicans have the Never Trump movement. We see the foolishness and we are vocal in our criticism and disgust, warning against the dangers of populism. Sure, there is populism in every democratic nation. But you don't systematize or foster it. Is there the same reaction among Democrats over professed socialists in their ranks? If the Dems run a serious candidate in 2020, I'll vote for him/her. If it's Mr Sanders, I will not, nor will any other level-headed voter who understands liberty and America.
90
@mainliner
Trump thanks you.
25
Mr. Stephens doesn't seem to understand the concept of a mixed economy, which is hard to believe. He's lived in one all his life. Perhaps he should take the time to read today's op-ed by Mr. Cohen, who does decent job of explaining it in a few words.
Free market capitalism has shown itself to be an effective economic system. However, as it's shown time and time again, it has flaws. Consider the economic history of the United States, which has been punctuated by financial panics, depressions and gross inequities not to mention horrible cruelties towards those on the bottom of the economic ladder. Actions on the part of the government to mitigate the impact of these flaws doesn't mean that we're on the road to a Maoist hell. They mean that we understand that we as a people can and should take action to insure the system operates to the benefit of everyone.
15
So, Bret -- you want Denmark-style capitalism in the U.S., rather than the version promoted by your old employer, WSJ, on its editorial page? And you'd support a Democratic candidate who promoted such a view?
I didn't think so....
All this endless advice for Democrats coming from the Times' right-wing marching band. If you guys are so insightful, why are you Republicans?
16
"Capitalism demands the best of every man—his rationality—and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/capitalism.html
50
"Moderate Democrats are by no means an endangered species, but increasingly they act like a hunted one....Is this good politics? I doubt it."
Weird, huh, when right wing journalists give 'helpful advice' to the party they vote against on how that party can win?
You'd think...oh, I don't know...that they were actually afraid: afraid the progressive currents they say are a sure loser might be widely popular with Americans, might shift the whole national conversation left...might even win:
https://fair.org/home/the-return-of-the-inexplicable-republican-best-friend/
"Media present GOP left-bashing as good-faith advice"
5
“Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone.”
Gee, Bret, sounds like you’ve become a fan of Robert Reich just like me! I presume you’ve read his book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/books/review/robert-reichs-saving-capitalism.html
Also, your claim that median household income is “as high as ever” is misleading. I clicked on your link, and it’s from FRED (Fed Reserve), dated December 1, 2016, and it says right in there that “median household income has stagnated for two decades.” We all know where the big gains were: at the top. Socialism for the wealthy and rugged capitalist individualism for the rest of us.
19
Odd that most of the readers comments understand better than a NYT columnist the plain fact that this is not a black and white issue?? Yes, odd because polarization serves no civic purpose and so one wonders why something so simplistic was published.
Stevens has university degrees and yet advocates like a child arguing in high school debates. He polarizes and obscures the serious, worthy, and nuanced issues here that many readers do seem to understand very much need to be addressed.
This polarizing article only serves to cloud serious discussion and mischaracterize and demonize those whom Stevens dislikes. We all know where that sort of thing goes. By slapping stereotypes on those he dislikes, he encourages his followers not to listen seriously to and cogitate on what they have to say. This is the worst sort of polemics from an intellectual point of view.
The Times should be ashamed to publish this sort of thing. It is an insult to our intelligence.
Most of us are fully aware that the choices before us are not black or white. This essay is a step backwards. Let's see some constructive ideas about how to deal with an economic system that needs some sort of effective accountability.
9
What is the point of this article?
So he is inferring that anyone who is a socialist is seeking to have all private property taken over by government. And all jobs will be provided by government. This is what I am hearing. This is pure elephant dung.
Let’s take the main things Americans are talking about. Health care and education. One is needed to live and the other is needed for a country to survive technologically and politically.
Insurance. It’s purpose is diametrically appears to health care. Meaning the entire point of insurance is to make money by only picking healthy people who don’t get sick or have low probability to do so. They are at odds even with the doctors profession in seeking to keep costs down and charge the highest prices possible.
The health care system in the United States is not working! It’s like a power utility that only supplies power to half the country while the other half lives in the dark yet says it serves everyone. Capitalist failure, Check. Not capable of actually providing the service to everyone in the community and only wants to serve people who don’t need it.
Education you would think would be heavily supported by capitalists. If you want a strong economy of the future you need high support for education. Yet it’s overly expensive and limits the supply. I’m not sure why it’s seen as socialist when it is key to any thriving society that desires liberty. Liberty needs education for all to survive.
6
Hillary's campaign was fueled by: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, entertainment industry. What more proof do you need about capitalism and the democratic party?
Bernie Sanders' campaign on the other hand, was and is fueled by little people, we the ordinary American people, and not by big corporate financiers. Like you say, he is as authentic as they get. And people who don't see that, are being blatantly anti semitic because Bernie does not meet the standard stereotypical "Trump quote: The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/8-of-the-sleaziest-things-donald-trump-has-said-54485/
2
Personally, I don’t think that Hickenlooper’s screwup has anything to do with economic systems.
I think it has to do with his acting like a trimmer, with fumfuhing around rather than just plain saying what he thinks. Obama was probably the slickest I’ve ever heard at doing this politely (and that’s a compliment not an insult) Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are way over on the other end, just pretty much putting it out there.
You can just come out with it, or you can say it politely, but you better learn to say it, or at least look like you are. It’s how Trump got elected, though that’s like saying “Well, at least Adolf was clear and kept his promises,” or, “well, good thing he’s clueless, arrogant, greedy and too infantile to tell the same whopper twice running.”
But I swear that if Hillary Clinton had just plain snapped ONCE during those debates, turned around, and colorfully told the fat slob to get way off her back, then told reporters that she didn’t care whether that was okay with them or not, she would be President today.
3
You are a sharp guy. Where did you get your history?
I got mine from my dad, a Teddy Roosevelt Republican who voted for FDR four times, even as members of my dad's party called him a commie and a "Jew Lover". Talk about anti-semitism -- with Father Coughlin and Lindberg there was no debatable rhetoric. They specialized in anti-semitism.
I studied "isms" under Professsor Freddy Daimant, who escaped the Holocaust only to be captured by the Wehrmacht after parachuting into Normandy. He ensured that his students understood that the word socialism had been fought over, with Lenin wanting a monopoly over the word only to be thwarted by the democratic socialists (social democrats -- same thing) who refused to yield their claim.
Look who put the finishing touches on Germany's economic miracle, Willy Brandt andHelmut Schmidt, Social Democratic Chancellors. Neither advocated state ownership of the means of production. And Spain's most successful Socialist President of the Cortes (PM) Felipe Gonzales, an admirer of Brandt and Schmidt, sold off or closed red ink drenched state enterprises, established by Franco's crazy quilt corporate state.
Bernie doesn't advocate state ownership of the means of production. Why mix him up with communists? The worst enemies of capitalism are capitalists, not social democrats.
5
Hey Bret do some research. Detail all of the exploitation, misery, death (genocide of millions of native in the US alone, etc), dispossession, etc related to capitalism in the last 400 years. My hypothesis is that capitalism has nothing over the socialist/communist experiment. Of course, you nor anyone else want to do this because you are afraid of what you will discover.
1
One slogan of the Republican Party against the Democrats could be:
Capitalism is God plan.
Socialism is Lucifer plan.
Vote Republican and Paradise!
1
Please read. From 2005.
"Market-based capitalism requires a platform of political freedom, the creation of wealth and fairness in its distribution."
HOW DO WE DEFINE "FAIR" IN TODAY'S WORLD? Is it really fair? For whom?
https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/freedom-fairness-and-american-capitalism/
1
What you are trying to defend is simply fascism or, as its founder Benito Mussolini described it, corporate government.
86
Stephens's most disgusting column yet. I may never read another. I stopped reading this one when he tossed in the word "charity", as if it was anything but an apology for the misery, immorality and ecological destructiveness of the so-called "creation" of wealth.
2
Capitalism has been corrupted by the corporatists. Change it or amerika dies.
3
I’m a Free Market Limited Socialist. Capitalism is run by humans, and humans do not “naturally” do the right thing. Each year we have a new crop of barbarians needing boundaries.....we call them children. Once they reach the boardrooms and ownership class, greed and the lust for power can sometimes supersede any sincere interest in the welfare of the average worker and even the welfare of planet earth. According to Fortune magazine, America is the richest country in the world, and also the most wealth unequal. Research shows 40% of Americans couldn’t come up with $400 to cover an emergency expense. My point is that Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, etc ....(limited socialism)....are necessary to maintain the floor under the lower classes and prevent anarchy. As time passes, we have to adjust this limit, up or down, to maintain stability.
2
We do have both capitalism and socialism. We have Social Security; we have Medicare. And Trump isn’t that crazy about private property rights, unless it’s his property, given the fact that he’s ready to declare eminent domain at the border in order to build his stupid wall.
4
Capitalism works very good indeed for the lucky few who find themselves at the pinnacle. But for average Americans, not so much. Consider the individual median wage of $31,562 or about $15.78 per hour, this means 1/2 of Americans make LESS.
See : https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2017
Worse, after inflation, wages have remained flat since the Nixon years.
See:https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/02/21/five-decades-of-middle-class-wages-january-2019-update
So Bret, if capitalism is working so well, please explain these numbers.
5
This is just what the Dems need. Advice from Bret Stephens
Man has never been right about anything in his life. How'd the Iraq war go, Bret? Any regrets on that one? I have no doubt that Bret couldn't care about the hundreds of thousand dead Iraqi civilians but do you ever give a second, or first, thought to all the American soldiers who were killed or got their legs blown off so armchair hardasses like Stephens could feel tough.
That Pulitzer must have been for cluelessness.
2
With the modifier “proud,” Scarborough’s question a form of the offensive “Have you beat your wife lately?” The only intelligent answer would be to turn the question back on the interrogator. Like Jesus did to the religious leaders of his day. But we know where that got him.
1
Did Stephens cut his teeth at the ws journal op ed pages? Aspects of “capitalism” are indeed superior to every economic system of resource allocation including the serfdom state we live in now. The one thing “capitalism” is pretty poor at doing is dividing up consumer surplus. Due to many market imperfections big biz is grabbing the rents. Distortions like monopsony have depressed wages. I really would not expect a
Blow hard like Brett to get into the deep weeds, but if u do the story is much more muddled.
2
Once again another attention deficit hyperbole argument
Yawn. Mr. Stephens hasn't been at the Times very long, but already he bores me. So predictable. So tedious. His views merely repeat what's already been said and add nothing to the discussion. In reference to this column today, he should glance over at his colleague Roger Cohen's column, also published today, "Socialism and the 2020 American Election". Now there's something worth reading. Some ideas that aren't stale. Actual information. Opinion that causes one to actually think.
2
Let me know how that works out for you.
Oh please! Bernie Sanders IS a capitalist! Nothing he says is to the left of the fair deal.
This column is willfully slippery misuse of terms and you should be ashamed of yourself. Agreed, the rhetoric of socialism is gratuitous, but come on! Nobody is advocating central planning. Nobody. Bernie calls himself a "socialist," ergo he's a of the Stalinist type? That's absurd and you know it.
You are also willfully confused about "capitalism." I hardly know where to start here, but you might begin by recognizing that the state creates and maintains the money supply in any monetized economy. The state defines and maintains property. (Hmm. . . I can copy and distribute 10% of your book but not 11%; that would violate your property rights. This activity violates your patent, but this one does not, etc.) And here is the kicker, the state grants the privilege of incorporation that alone shields the assets of the corporation from the incorporators themselves! Then it grants the corporation a lower tax rate than the individual.
Examined up close, capitalism is a regulatory scheme of the state. And if the state (we the people) don't like the outcome of one regulatory regime (one version of capitalism), we created it and we can change it.
It will still be "capitalism."
1
“ a Country at peace ( check ) “. Please, Sir, tell THAT to all our troops serving Overseas, in conflict zones, Terrorist and tribal infected areas, and anywhere, really, where a rage filled Idiot expresses His hostility with extreme prejudice. Maybe your version of Peace means that only the volunteers, mostly working class Males, are in peril. Those with other options are off the hook, and free to opine about “ our Troops “ from their armchairs, having NO personal experience serving in the Armed Forces. Very proud Veteran here, married to a Veteran, from a Family of Veterans. My BEST accomplishment.
1
I am unsure how Mr Stephens got his job at NYT. He logical, methodical articles just don't seem to jibe with the rest of the hysterics.
My greatest concern is that Trump is incompetent, yet we are becoming numb to the non stop outrage that reached a crescendo at the inauguration and has not let down.
What a shallow "rags to riches" hymn to greed. Living off the sweat of another's brow ought to be as illegal as it is immoral. It has institutionalized the 7 deadly sins and been the engine of income and wealth inequality forever. It perpetuates the oligarchies of states, the power lock the rich have and the corruption of industry through the ages.
Sure, people get rich... but when does the reality of no net gain without another's loss touch on the justification of economic Darwinism's prima facie evil?
1
I fear that you darned Americans have too much contempt for each other. Your political right and left are too far apart and call each other too many names. Voters should try to find a place near the middle of today's "socialism vs. capitalism."
I live up here in Canada - 90-minutes from upstate New York. We are a capitalist country and vital for the grandest economy in world history - and vice versa. We have bounced the political ball a bit from left to right up here, but none of the USA"s bitterness has ever come to the fore. Universal medicare does exist from coast to coast - and it is embraced "across the board" in the country. Taxpayers - including businesses - pay for it. And they are willing to do so. It was first started by the CCF (socialist) party in province of Saskatchewan in the late 1950s. Soon afterward, it spread quickly from coast to coast. Brought in through the 1960s, it has consistently been embraced by Conservative governments as much as by Liberal governments and the NDP. It's part of Canada's capitalism.
1
Is there truly a system that will work for everyone? I have nothing against capitalism when everyone plays by the same rules, but the grotesque amount of money in politics has ensured that the rich are driving policy and are getting tax breaks, at the cost of the disappearing middle class. Obviously you seem to imply that our current economy is attributable only to Trump....it most certainly is not. (Check). You state that the average median income is the highest it’s ever been, but fail to mention your source. You fail to address how capitalism is going to manage the workers who will be displaced because of automation. (Check) You fail to mention the rising cost of healthcare and how poorly capitalism has dealt with that problem. (Check). And last but not least, you make light of the many investigations into Trump, his organization, his inaugural committee, his campaign, his weird embrace of Putin, Kim Jong Un, the Saudi Prince and his complete disdain of our allies and lie after lie that Trump spews on a daily basis (Check, Check and Check) Just how can you overlook Trump’s character flaws and the serious damage it is doing to our democracy. You’re worried about capitalism? Perhaps you should spend more time worrying about the survival of our democracy Bret.
4
The US Constitution says nothing pro or con about capitalism, but it specifically promises that the government should “promote the general welfare” of its citizens. Why does Bret ignore this important fact?
5
Brett:
You forget that the economy is doing the same as under Obama. But this is an incredibly corrupt administration, that has made no effort to reach out and unite the country, is actively hostile to half of America, and has totally undermined the constitution and norms.
And you don’t see any of this and don’t recognize that most decent people in the country won’t stand for this.
5
Whenever conservative columnists can't win an argument, which is pretty often, they create straw men. Mr. Stephens has, with this column, followed that time-honored tradition.
Democrats are no more anti-capitalism than they are anti-automobile. But capitalism unregulated is a monster, and history proves it. So Democrats want regulated capitalism just as they want helmets for motorcycles, seatbelts for cars, and speed limits for traffic. This is hardly socialism.
Moderate Democrats, especially those who say they can reach across the aisle and "solve America's problems" or "get things done" don't deserve a single vote because they are naïve to the point of insanity. If the years since 2008 have shown us nothing else, they have shown us that when they don't have the White House the GOP simply obstructs, and when they do have the White House the GOP changes rules, throws out norms, and can't govern anyway.
The first step in fixing the country's problems is to follow the lead of California, vote the Republicans out, and keep them out.
6
These days even the staunchest defenders of capitalism think that it needs to be “moderated” and “restrained”, beyond just enforcing existing laws.
It’s worth remembering that Obama, who was no Socialist, took essentially the approach that business can be merely tolerated as long as it is heavily taxed and subject to an exponentially increasing amount of regulation.
The strengthening of the economy started even before Trump’s inauguration. Even with all the fears that come with having an inept and corrupt president, getting rid of suffocating regulations buoyed the economy, long before the tax changes - it was called the Nobama effect and it should be a wake-up call for those who believe that ever increasing regulation is OK.
It’s more difficult to be a ‘capitalist’ in a country where you don’t get healthcare unless you work for a capitalist who provides it.
3
It is very presumptuous of a person when they think they can read the mind of an organization or even another individual, but that doesn't prevent Mr. Stephens. The kind of schtick we see here is just plain awful. Mr. Stephens is trying to make a case for what used to be the Republican mainstream, you know, the people who smell the money. Failing to do so, he bolsters Trump.
The fact is that these people, like Mr. Stephens, are behaving as if the end of the earth is coming.In short, that means paying more taxes. There is a limit to just how much the philosophy of consumption, a more practical term for capitalism, can benefit a society before it destroys it. Mr. Stephens is an ideologue, so it would impossible for him to discern the working of the Democratic Party or the people, especially the young people, who compose it, and who have had it with Mr. Stephens plain greed and the Republican Party.
2
Democrats are doomed if they veer off into never-never land with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Stop talking about Green New Deals which can easily be lampooned by Republicans as the talk of hair brained socialists, and start talking about common sense and decency that no one can argue with. Focus less on “policy” and more about rediscovering what makes America special—a big heart, opportunity, kindness, humor, loyalty, and, yes, truth, all of which Trump has eviscerated.
Democrats want a fighter who will call out Trump, and the autocrats he hangs with. Go after the swamp creatures he promised to get rid of, but are still rooted in place.
Stop apologizing for not being liberal enough. Be proud of what you’ve accomplished, but always be striving for better.
And, finally, stop berating Bret Stephens. He, and millions more like him, are the people we want and need if we’re going to bring down Trump and begin to restore our democracy.
2
My dear for this country is that democracies tend to vote for benefits and spending, but want someone else to pay for it. This is true whether they party in power is liberal or conservative. We lower taxes (not just in the wealthy), we increase defense spending, and now we want free health care and college for everyone. Sounds wonderful. How do we pay for it? Don't just say tax the wealthy. Show us the math. It doesn't add up.
Biden seems at this point the candidate most likely to be able to win big..Hickenlooper for VP. Early yet but given the electoral college I see more progressives having a much harder time winning and another 4 years of a Republican white house is a heavy price.Seems to me wise to go with the candidate with the best chance of victory
All human progress since the 18th Century has been created by Capitalism. Any problems have been caused either by its incomplete implementation or by the moral failings of human beings. Why do we resist perfection?
Conceptually, our economy, as most economies in the world, is a hybrid economy with capitalistic and socialistic features. On the latter point, ignore the demagoguery of the wealthy elites and their supporters and think of Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and bank bailouts, for a few examples. There has never been a such thing as a pure free market devoid of government intervention. The objective of any economy is to create a workable balance that protects the ingenuity and industriousness of capitalists while creating a satisfactory level of prosperity for people in the middle and lower classes. Our economy has been way out of balance for decades now as supply-side economics has failed to live up to its promise and create broad financial prosperity for most Americans. This is why the American government must refocus its attention on the middle and lower working classes, and to use a favorite phrase from the patron saint of supply-side economics, relegate it to the ash heap of history.
3
Capitalism in its purist form is not the enemy of Democracy. But, we don't live with its purist form. We live in an oligarchy, which is capitalism devoid of curiosity, ambition, creativity and every other positive emotion that could make it a vital force in civilization. Oligarchies are about making it safe for monopolists, for trust fund babies, for old politicians and old men.
Jamie Dimon and David Koch wouldn't last a year as true capitalists. They have turned capitalism into a dirty word. It is right that a party of conscience, the Democratic party, would shy away from such labels.
3
The idealized capitalism described by Stephens here is as pure and perfect as the perpetual motion machine, table-top cold fusion, and the alchemy of turning lead into gold.
The reality, though, is managed brutality, so that the big dogs do not totally devour the little dogs who work for them.
Government, barely, prevents such "capitalism" from imploding under the force of unbridled greed.
We need stronger government to protect capitalism from the inherent greed that fuels it.
There is nothing "socialistic" about Eisenhower era tax rates.
1
So, successful European countries aren't socialist, but Bernie Sanders who wants to adopt the same policies is? That makes no sense.
Conservatives like to call everything that helps ordinary people socialist. Social security, medicaid, medicare, and now medicare for all. Then when you point out that people like these policies, and every other first world country has adopted universal health care, they say "oh, well that's not socialism, I meant soviet russia/venesuela." Never mind that trump is BFF's with the former head of the KGB.
Conservatives are debating semantics because they've lost the war of ideas. People like the policies behind "democratic socialism."
4
Just like pure socialism on balance would have horrible consequences, unfettered capitalism needs to be updated to better address modernity, globalism, the environment and increasing social support needs. The "Intended" consequences of the form of capitalism promoted by the GOP has consequences equally as horrible. Just look at how technology BOT aided, international and special interest funded interests literally handed our election to an incompetent, immoral, criminal fraud. And now we abandon any investment in programs like infrastructure, and education that are in the broad public interest as we fiddle with MBS, Putin and Kim Jung Un to enrich oligarchs.
4
Sheeesh Brett. What a dishonest rendering you have written. You have had to conveniently leave out so much of the story of the past 100 years of Conservative economic failure. I'd like to see you argue with Kevin Phillips (Yes. THAT Kevin Phillips.) and his book, "Wealth and Democracy." I challenge anyone to read that book and then reread this Brett Stephens masterpiece of economic ignorance and prevarication.
Brett, you've been a supporter of the very people who have collapsed the economy at least three times since Nixon. Your argument is totally without merit when the blanks you left are filled in. You have exactly ZERO credibility as a conservative trying to tell the rest of us how this should work. With the exception of Eisenhower, every Republican president since Warren G. Harding has been an economic failure. The history and statistics are available to anyone who wants the truth.
6
Republicans want to argue about socialism and capitalism because it takes the light off the problem they don't want to talk about: corruption. Neither capitalism nor socialism works for the people when there is a class of corrupt oligarchs profiting from criminal acts. If they can change the laws and make their criminal acts legal, so much the better for them. Citizens United for example.
6
Those ‘capitalist’ countries you mentioned have publicly funded healthcare, education and elections.
5
Your quote “ like a vegetarian, who still wants his bacon “ is in bad taste and insulting to the vegetarians.
The problem with US capitalism is that it is 'unfettered'. There is no effective replacement for capitalism that has ever worked for all citizens. So, when unfettered, greed and corruption take over. Seems awfully simple and there is more than adequate proof here in the US. The GOP has loosened the Gods of greed and corruption on the US. We now have socialism for corporations and the 10% and capitalism for everyone else.
Fact: many northern EU countries have a nicely blended mix of capitalism and democratic socialism. Entrepreneurs flourish. People are happy. 'Socialism' here is just another scare word for the GOP who don't actually understand the word itself. Conservatives want to preserve something that has never really existed. Plain and simple stupidity.
2
See Cohens piece in this same paper about French Socialism, and then try to get that message across
2
trump & friends: complete disregard for the constitution of the United States, check. It will be a referendum on these grifters, they will lose massively, and it will be oh, so, sweet.
1
A major problem is that leftist Democrats have been playing a nasty semantic game with the term “socialism”. Some of them will tell you that “the state needs to control the means of production”, which is Marxist Socialism (early stage of Communism). When you point to that, they immediately change the tune and say “we should be like Denmark”. But the Scandinavian countries are very much capitalist, with strong social protections (sometimes called social democracy in Europe). After reassuring you this way, they switch back to explaining how Capitalism has failed the masses and needs to be replaced by Socialism. So then Socialism is not Social Democracy, a version of Capitalism, but something entirely different, going back to the Marxist definition.
Using this Socialism with “variable geometry” is becoming the signature trick for 2020. For the activists, the message is “we’ll overthrow capitalism”; for the people who actually work and are concerned about their wealth, the message is “don’t worry, you’ll keep what you have and get free health care and 35 hour work week”.
Sixth extinction (check)
Insect armageddon (check)
Soil erosion (check)
Gulf dead zone (check)
Unsustainable industrial agriculture
Food system built on a hegemony of monopolies
Hollowing out of rural america (check)
Roads and bridges going to hell (check)
Coal lobbyists running the EPA (check)
Monsanto writing its own rules (check)
Decimated environmental monitoring and enforcement (check)
Reduced human life spans (check)
Socializing all the costs of capitalism (check)
Pushing all the costs of capitalism on to tomorrow (check)
Sentencing the country to four more years of planet destroying criminal cartels to save the world from sanity (check).
4
I am getting a bit tired of your myopic columns that willfully ignore all the damage that unfettered capitalism has done, and is doing, to both our society (limitless exploitation of the poor and inexorably advancing inequality) and the global environment (pollution, externalities of industry for which industry fails to accept any responsibility). Yes, capitalism is the best system for growing a productive economy, but it has to be well regulated to protect the larger interests of society and humankind. It has not been, and if conservatives like you continue to hold sway, it never will be. Because you just can't see past the $$$$$.
6
Capitalism is the greatest destroyer of the environment ever. Hurray.
2
I get really tried of Republican pundits like Stephens condescendingly lecturing Dems about what we should/shouldn't be doing.
Why don't you write a column lecturing McConnell to allow a vote on the election reform bill that was passed by the House?
Why don't you write a column admonishing Jordan and Meadows aabout their disgusting behavior during the Cohen hearing?
Meanwhile, you're lecturing Dems about how we should behave, when your own party displays a poster "Liar, liar, pants on fire" in an important hearing about the corruption of our President?
Sorry, but you need to get your own party in order before we can give anything you say to us any credence.
4
this is a fake issue if there ever was one. Yet, it will be the main talking point of the GOP, trying to turbocharge fear in their voters.
Divide, divide, divide. Maybe the label should be DDD instead of GOP.
5
Why does the NYT insist on foisting us such out of touch and tone deaf pundits who can’t see the pavement from the penthouse suite?
Capitalism US-style doesn’t spread the wealth, it concentrates it. Shame on the NYT and shame on Stephens. He needs to get out more. What does he have to say to those who can’t afford insulin? Those students who have to visit food pantries? Those bankrupted by medical bills? Those who have to train their foreign replacements as a condition of their severance? Answer:nothing. He has nothing to say about the hard economic issues that affect the majority. And doubtless nothing to offer the millennial generation that reject capitalism US-style because our generation denied them the same opportunities we had.
5
Sorry, but a question like, "Are you a proud capitalist?" is nauseatingly gimmicky.
198
Bret Stephens, you are a simpleton. Define capitalism.
2
Another laughably racist column from Bret. So Gillum lost in Florida because he was progressive? No mention of race. Kind of like saying Hitler picked on Jews because they lived in cities. They largely did, but that's besides the point
1
"Until about, oh, a year ago, few Democrats would have disagreed. Not anymore."
Balderdash, Stephens. Neither Democrats nor anyone else who grew up in America believes any such thing. However, those of us who lived through the upheavals of the day -- my tenure in the respect dates back to the end of World War II -- knows for damn sure that capitalism is far, far from perfect.
What we do know is that "socialist" programs like Social Security (apparently still controversial in some circles despite having provided genuine help to Americans since the 1930s) and Medicare/Medicaid (don't even get me started on those!) are worthy, fair, and inexpensively administered. Ditto the ACA.
Socialism, that boogie man we are constantly warned by Republicans will lead to the demise of our country, has been a Godsend to millions of Americans. You and your conservative buddies need to off your high horses and into the muck of the stables, where most of us have to work. Maybe a year or two of actually having to deal with those capitalist bastards who have inserted themselves -- uninvited and unwanted -- who run not just businesses but the government of our country would open your eyes.
I guarantee you, more socialism would be a good thing if Americans weren't so propagandized against it.
5
When are we going to accept the reality that our two-party system is as antiquated and absurd as lighting our spaces with coal gas? The two-party system as it's currently configured is a direct inheritance from the corrupt days following the Civil War, an event that an astonishing number of Ummuricans don't know anything about. Any more than they realize just how they're being screwed all the time by our policital system which is totally dominated by big money interests and their lobbies. Despite the fact that many of these multinationals pay no tax and are offshore, we allow them to dominate our legislature and all of its processes in exchange the personal gain of a select few congressmen.
2
While overstating the case, BS is on to something important. As it stands now the rapidly evolving Democratic platform is chasing moderate, centrist, pragmatists who are proud of our imperfect democracy and yes, our imperfect capitalism right out of the party. To where? Who knows. But don’t take my vote for granted.
1
Mr. Hickenlooper's answer was weak not because it failed to embrace capitalism but because he appeared to lack confidence in his beliefs and seemed slow on his feet. I believe in capitalism, well regulated so that all who contribute to the resulting prosperity benefit from it. If a politician gets up and bellows, "I am a proud capitalist" like some preening caricature out of a Tennessee Williams play, I am running, not walking. to the nearest exit. What he is really saying is that he is beyond reproach, the hallmark of all snake-oil salesmen and con artists.
5
When I go down the list of policies I favor, I find that, item for item, they're off or near the left side of any chart that will be offered to the American electorate in the coming election.
At the same time, I feel strongly that "socialism" is the wrong word to offer along with the policies, not only because it's poor salesmanship but also because I rebel against it myself. Regardless of the good meaning it might have if it were coined today, the fact is that the coin has been passed from hand to hand till it bears the accumulated grime of murderous tyranny, cold-blooded deceit, and hot-blooded sociopolitical bullying.
But what I'm really writing to say is that the word "capitalism" is nearly as repellent now, and gaining. The good ring it once had in many American ears, including mine, was due entirely to indoctrination. After all, it has nothing to do either etymologically or logically with the ethos of success through hard work. It has to do with putting up money to get other people working for you.
Conservatives, moderates, and label-deprived people like me all need to recognize that individual responsibility, industriousness, and, above all, freedom are essential to our national health; but that reverence for capitalism is not.
I distrust socialism with a human face, and yet I'm tired of waiting for capitalism with a human heart. Let's work out something new.
194
@Longestaffe
"it bears the accumulated grime of murderous tyranny, cold-blooded deceit, and hot-blooded sociopolitical bullying."
Are you talking about socialism, or the Trump presidency?
14
Of course Hickenlooper squirmed. That's what he does best.
Bret Stephens and others of his ilk cheering on the destructive distorted hyper-capitalism of the last 30 yrs are like Marie Antoinette asserting and indulging in the privileges of royalty; they know nothing of the system beyond its glossy veneer. The problem with unveiling the devastating impacts of hyper-capitalism is not with the messengers; it is with the enchanted, drugged, addicted masses who wish not to hear the truth, and instead skip along with their fingers in their ears, having bought the lie that they somehow deserve the comforts for which they prostitute themselves and discard others, but all the while twittering nervously, knowing deep down that it's a corrupt, immoral house of cards, built on the backs of desperate, voiceless, bewildered individuals, struggling in servitude so that an immoral, inhuman, sociopathic few may live as gods.
4
We are a capitalist country with a social conscience. There, was that so hard?.
1
FDR suffered the same attacks and did, well, ok. This is the lame, dimwit explanation/justification of capitalism, a perversion of modern economics except those enraptured by trickle-down voodoo.
If advocating Medicare for all, fair tax rates, an end to foreign wars, a Marshall Plan for education is Scarborough and Stephens' litmus test for outing socialists, then count me in brother.
One more thing: Trump is going down. Nothing you can do will save him (check).
4
Bret -
I always enjoy reading your column. You’re easily the best writer at this paper, and I am always learning new words I will never use.
Mostly, thanks for holding on to your principles.
The pressure must be immense, seeing that your colleagues only receive praise for their ultra-liberal views, while you are routinely excoriated by the comments (except when you write about Trump).
I wonder if the Editors pressure you to get more in line with the Times’ political leanings. I hope not. You have an important voice at this paper. It needs to be heard.
2
Capitalism creates wealth, new ideas, and hierarchies, especially in multicultural societies like ours. Socialism destroys all three.
"The most successful economic system shouldn’t be a dirty word."
The problem is that unfettered capitalism is a dirty word. I saw the exchange between Scarborough and Hickenlooper and it was really sad to watch Scarborough DEMAND unquestioning loyalty to what is apparently his economic religion. Scarborough sounded like a Joe McCarthy. Sad and pathetic.
2
It definitely is amazing how the Democrats have such a hard time being pro-capitalism, the welfare-state, and progressive taxation at the same time--especially when the three should flow naturally together. It's this amateur-hour nonsense that allows Republicans to get elected on lizard-brain appeals to greed and bigotry.
2
Bernie Sanders is not a winner. He's not authentic either.
Do your homework.
1
Feel the Bern. Not authentic? This guy is more Columbo than Columbo.
At least this article is not unrestrained hate-speech like the last one.
We can either make humans work for the sake of having them work, or we can use AI so we can have more humans capable of having leisure time, and in essence turn our economy into a group of state-backed entrepreneurs working on what they want to work on, working in a way that incentivizes collaboration (giving higher rates of capital to larger groups), and that incentivizes societal growth (giving higher rates to sciences that benefit the species than individual art portfolios). Either way, humans are approaching a time when they should be able to do whatever they want, and should have the actual freedom to be the artists, inventors, and scientists.
However, we are not going to get there if we keep conflating the debate as Mr. Stephens does to a question of free-market vs government. That isn't the debate. All markets have rules, and it is the rules to the game of our particular free-market that are most destructive to the system's image. It has nothing to do with either the free-market or government because we aren't living in either. We are living in a system where the government helps those who already best exploit the demands of the current market. In other words, the game's rules make the inherently unfair game more unfair-- and that is bad policy!
The times badly needs a socialist oped writer, but if that is still too much for u, at least give the people a Keynesian political economist.
2
Brett displays his one-sidedness again. “Capitalism” is not a bug-a-bear, but “me-me-only-me Capitalism” is what we have to deal with. The denigration of every effort to “float all boats” instead of “float all yachts” is misguided, as is the belief that every social benefit can be provided by a profit-before-all-else business.
By failing to seek a balanced view Brett becomes an ignorable hack.
3
Thriving economy (Obama's), a country at peace (We haven't been invaded on our own soil in over a century), congressional oversight (fruitful), actual regulation of an industry that has gone unchecked (EU will if we don't), inconclusive Mueller report (I'll give you this one because I don't know either frankly), and a Democratic party that actually wrestles with bigotry in its ranks, unlike Republicans (this isn't both-sidesing. Democrats try. Repubs don't).
As for the free-market system, nobody yet is urging the government to seize the means of production.
Go back to 7th grade, Bret.
2
Usually, I think Stephens is a partisan idiot, but I agree with too much of what he says here. I don't want any party to be led by extremists but I have no control over the GOP's deranged rightwing extremism. If the Democratic Party devolves into the "Social Democratic" Party, we will have no government at all. We'll have two dug in camps that refuse to compromise.
This is supposed to be a representative democracy. I don't like when the GOP is in charge but, before the 1990's when the GOP turned politics into Sherman's march through Georgia, I felt like an American, no matter who was in the White House or who ran Congress. Now, despite numbers that make it clear that, at least, half the country doesn't want to live in rightwing nirvana, trump and Congress call us the enemy and treat us as such while using ort tax dollars to subsidize billionaires. That is wrong. It's un-American.
Democrats need to be very careful not to embrace a radical leftwing candidate or agenda. We're better than that. We're better than today's GOP.
capitalists should work to clean up their own mess before worrying about democratic socialists. let's face it free market capitalists from both parties have soiled their own nest. you point to employment and wage growth..... but it will take years and years of this to put working people back in a position where they are not deep in debt and/or working paycheck to paycheck..... and at some point during this restoration process even more protections will be removed and the economy, run by the wealthy, will take the rest away and they will have to start over...... bring on democratic socialism! it can't be worse than what we have had for the last 40 years.
2
What Hickenlooper was speaking was about was finding solutions which work for everyone and not using labels which tend to to divide (identity politics).
He suggested for example that people with private health insurance they like though their jobs be allowed to keep it. He was taken aback by Scarborough's repeated question "Are you a Capitalist?"
I agree with Hickenlooper on the need to get away from labels in this country, to find common ground and solutions for issues such such as health care and preventing climate change. People can be in favor of free enterprise but not call themselves "Capitalists", a term spawned by the Karl Marx's theories which has a direct association with leftist rhetoric and is often used as a pejorative.
Hickenlooper was clearly in favor of the idea of combining public sector programs such as Social Security or Medicare, (which were once called 'Socialism' when 'Dems' first proposed) with free enterprise. He is trying to get away from the over simplification of labels, which have been used by current leadership to demonize groups and divide people against each other in the USA. (The politics of fear).
" Although Karl Marx did not create the word, it was after his work “Das Kapital” (1867) when the term “capitalism” began to be widely used to describe an economic system based on private property as the means of production."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrochafuen/2013/05/01/the-sad-decline-of-the-word-capitalism/#132710f2a712
2
Improve your foresight. 2020 vision begins with Hickenlooper.
2
This column is yet another in the NY Times' long history of concern trolling Democrats.
Stephens presents "capitalism" as the most successful economic system. What he wants is completely unfettered capitalism. And where has that gotten us? To economic inequality at a level not seen since the dawn of the Industrial age.
Heavily regulated capitalism, high taxes on the rich and new socialist government programs produced the longest sustained boom time in American history from the end of WWII through the 1970s.
There's nothing wrong with democratic socialism, as practiced by most of the first world. Stephens appears deathly afraid that a majority of voters will find this out.
2
Most self proclaimed capitalists are "like a vegetarian who still wants his bacon, to have it both ways". They want free markets for themselves, but want regulation to prevent natural competitors from having the same freedom. Oh, and they want government program subsidies like interest deductions.
Hickenlooper is like a carnivore who still wants his vegetables. He knows that even the magical unicorn managed but still free markets aren't enough on their own to keep people healthy. Eating only what you kill leads to an early death if you have nobody to share with.
1
One of the reasons why the right-wing charge of “socialism...”
Reasons why is redundant. It should be "One of the reasons that.."
Or, even better, just "One of the reasons..."
After getting Stephens to give the Democrats political advice, for our next trick let’s put the fox in charge of the chickens.
2
It is worth noting that so far at least, the American public, or Trump followers, are more comfortable with fascism than socialism.
1
Mr. Stephens, I was with you until you dragged the poor Congresswoman into an irrelevant debate.
You’re writing about Capitalism, best to stick to the facts and the matter at hand!
Surprise, surprise, you might have an easier time getting your point across to your readers or whoever your intended audience is, unless of course it’s Netanyahu or the editorial staff at The Jerusalem Post.
You seem like an educated guy who can write well. It ill behooves you to engage in ‘whataboutism’ and ‘ad hominem’ line of questioning in response to anything anti-Israeli.
I may not agree with all aspects of Capitalism, but it has certainly worked for America and countries like Singapore and Japan among a host of others. Of course, no system is without faults and as such ‘income disparity’ (and social iniquities) need to be addressed for a semi-equitable distribution of wealth in a 1st world economy, no less!
3
Why nitpick about Democrats? Why not spend your time and space serving your readers and our country by castigating Mitch McConnell who has once again, by refusing a Senate vote on HR 1 election reform, usurped enormous power to promote Republican corruption of the Constitution and our broken electoral system- the failed engine of our democracy!!
5
“Democracy is the worst form of government...until you look all the alternatives”
Winston Churchill (sorta). Same for capitalism, sorta. But unbridled capitalism? No sir, gave us the Great Depression and the Great Recession (though rather like the designation of WWI as the Great War) I find nothing Great about them!
Rightists want capitalism without restraints, without oversight, without regulation. Let’s be clear there are unnecessary regulations, yet regulations basically are there to defend three areas, workers, consumers and the environment, three areas that the Grotesque
Obsequious Popinjays that is the
Republican Party advocates and cheers with each reckless EO from the UCC (unindicted co-conspirator).
As someone born in 1947 London I can testify what socialism is and none of our “progressives” and frankly all Democrats should be progressive rather than Poobican (if they’re gonna shorten the Dems name, we should do the same) regressives!
Sadly the American electorate is clueless about what socialism is and is not. There was still a National Health Service in Thatcher’s Britain, so clearly universal health coverage from the Government can’t be real socialism! Neither can dealing with Climate Change, embraced throughout the world. Nor protecting the rights of minorities. Cleaning up our tax code so Buffett’s secretary won’t pay a higher rate than Warren does? And let me give you the initials of Presidents who had a 70% top tax rate. LBJ, JFK, HST and...DDE!
1
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
Leonard da Vinci
2
"But Hickenlooper did allow this: “We worked 70, 80, 90 hours a week to build the business; and we worked with the other business owners...to help them build their business. Is that capitalism? I guess.” He guessed right."
This is asinine. That's hard work, cooperation--and luck. "Capitalism" is Moneyball--replacing landlords with moneylords--and letting them rule the world.
You think Capitalism vs Socialism is like Catholicism vs Islam. One myth vs another.
What WAS right (no guess about it ) was his protesting "the divisiveness of labels. He refused to reject the term “socialism.” ...There are parts of socialism, parts of capitalism, in everything.”
The US has ALWAYS been a mixed economy--some public, some private enterprise. So is everyplace else. We are all looking for the best balance.
1
The problem here is that like all "Conservatives" you are lying Mr Stephens. What you are calling capitalism is actually a colonial economy. Which is to say a centrally rigged economy.
The fact is Democratic Capitalism is what we had when FDR saved the country from the system you are describing and falsely claiming to have won the 20th century. All of the places you cite have strong regulations and enforcement of same. Which is what we had from 1932 until 1980 they years during which the wealth was distributed as widely as it ever has been in the US. Well regulated and controlled for corruption and unfairness and an eye toward creating and keeping jobs capitalism is what won the 20th century. That set of rules and regulations was not in any way what you are calling "Central Planning" in your cowardly passive aggressive attempt to portray Democrats as communists/socialists.
Take a look at the GOP they actually are communists in all but name since reagan in how they operate and what they have done. From the use of propaganda and manufactured fear to the criminal abuse of the positions they hold to rig the economy so only some win and distribute tax money to themselves and their friends, it is as purely corrupt and the antithesis of what they claim to be as Soviet Communists like Putin.
2
Bret has a difficult time with this concept as most Republicans and plenty of others do too.
The vast accumulation of ever more wealth by the One Percenters is sick. Mentally deranged. A severe societal affliction that corrodes and corrupts our ideals as humans and Americans.
This sort of greed is a poisonous affliction and it is just remarkable that such people are held in anything but sympathetic contempt for their remarkable inter-personal weakness. Greed is a dangerous disease.
This weakness and insanity perverts every sensibility or sensitivity they may have had. Take their money away and give them therapy. Eventually they and the social scientists will thank us, as will the rest of the World.
1
Mr Stephens is such a funny guy. Obviously, the interviewer was trying to co-opt Hickenlooper into some sort of Rah Rah statement about Capitalism, as if a brewery founder were the same as Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimond. Hickenlooper didn’t fall for it, refused to let them pigeonhole him as “Socialist” or “Capitalist” and Brett Stevens builds that into a global statement about the Democratic Party.
Stevens is reliably disingenuous, what the Greeks would have called a Sophist.
Ask Tom Steyer if the Democrats have given up on Capitalism. Or George Soros.
1
This climate change denier knows full well that there isn’t a true socialist running. But when a third of the eastern seaboard is under water I imagine Richy Rich’s like the author will be howling for government action, just like they did after the Lehman collapse. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us suckers.
2
The alleged economic plaudits you say Trump will claim as his own are absolutely nothing compared to the Obama achievement of turning around the Bush Depression and turning over to Trump a smooth running economy and bull market.
And drop the threats pertaining to perceived antisemitism in the Democratic Party. Jewish Americans are too smart to fall for the moral hectoring, itself ludicrous, coming from Trump.
2
If capitalism is defined as neoliberal economics, then no one outside the “activist shareholders” circle in the US and Western Europe supports it.
Credit card debt is at an all time high - comparable to pre-2008 Grand Recession levels. Suicide and addictions are at an all time high. Why? An indication that the economy is not working for most Americans, independent of labels dispensed by bougois opportunists
What the country wants is, at the very least, a return of regulations like the Glass-Steigel Act. Regulations that don’t pollute water tables, and FDA that guarantees oversight over safe food production. Schools that don’t put your children in danger of getting shot inside the classroom. Protection of companies like Purdue Pharma and people like the Sacklers who got the nation addicted to pain killers. A country that protects children from predators like Jeffery Epstein that protects women form men like Harvey Weinstein. A country that protects refugee children and parents from policies drafted by Steven Miller (with detention cages akin to a fascist planning of yesteryear ). A country that won’t send children to a nonsensical Iraqi-like war with Iran that will displace additional millions of people, many of whom are now refugees in Europe
Immigrants from all over the world flee Marxist systems. Bernie
won’t be President. Brett Stephens stop the hubristic propaganda by painting the new class of Democrats as enemies of the nation.
1
"An economy in which private property is protected, private enterprise is rewarded, markets set prices and profits provide incentives will, over time, generate more wealth, innovation and charity — and distribute each far more widely-"
Aw, what a pretty little speech.
But...capitalism will "over time" distribute that wealth?
Sorry, distribution delayed is distribution denied!
See, I'm one a'those Robin Hood-style socialists, Stephens - time to shake some corporate headquarters upside down by the ankles until their Trump tax cut moolah falls out, and plug it into vital human needs like healthcare and keeping the planet alive.
Because, come on, honestly - I think you and I both know, Stephens, that the rich are never ever gonna get behind those things on their own. Right? And the public good is just too important - too needed NOW - to wait for a few charitable alms to fall down like manna from their well-manicured paws...
2
Today's Raw Jungle Capitalists are what used to be called "The Ugly American"....gross, bloated, greedy and uncultured/unsophisticated...spewing trash & toxic garbage wherever they go, unconcerned and uncaring. This is not capitalism and John Smith warned about the dangers of unregulated capitalism in his original book on capitalism....maybe these greedy guys should have read Smith to the end and understood the nature of Capitalism, which is NOT the law of the jungle....this is not civilized, this is destructive for all life.
1
I wonder if Scarborough had asked Hickenlooper "are you a proud racist?" would Hickenlooper have said "(laugh) we'll y'know labels, I'm not into labels..."
Talk about a candidate that is not ready for prime time.
There’s a difference between taming a horse and shooting it.
This describes how Bret wants to to treat those who don't accept the misery Bret wants to consign them to. His columns on how to to treat Palestinians provide vivid examples. You tame them if you can. You shoot them if it that doesn't work.
2
Hickenlooper was wise to avoid inane and superficial commentary about capitalism and socialism which means different things to different people. The Koch brothers, whose family fortune was partially derived on paternal income from both Stalin and Hitler, would probably like to "reform" capitalism to do away with all the other reforms that impinge on their prerogatives. Is there a super-progressive mindset to some in the Democratic Party? Probably. And if they disenfranchise the moderates which gave them the House majority in 2018 they will be out of luck. America, the land of TV celebrities, hedge-fund operatives and fewer and fewer newspaper readers does not have an economic "philosophy." It has money, but not in every pocket.
2
You failed to mention the majority of trump campaign will be lies and racism
1
Bret Stephens is on the offensive. After being on the defensive from seeing his beloved party (in fact his entire ideology) jump on the Trump bandwagon, Stephens has decided to pick on any difference within the Democratic Party as proof positive that they are no better than Trump’s party. So some unknown candidate wasn’t able to say whether his was a capitalist (as if he were J. P. Morgan or a Rockefeller) and Stephens fantasizes that we are revisiting the Cold War, with the Democrats on the side of Communism.
Folks, don’t be fooled by this nonsense. Stephens is no different than Hannity or Laura Ingraham. He just spews his right-wing propaganda with fancier words and in the opinion pages of the NYT.
2
To rational middle and working class Americans, it is the Trump Republican Party, with ample help from its Trumpless predecessor, that has made “capitalism” a “dirty word”. In a widening swath of public thinking, they have solidly conjoined “capitalism” with its modifier “preditory”. “Successful” Mr. Stephens is only in the eyes of the “winners” in our present predatory capitalistic system. Of course these corporate/plutocratic winners in tax policies, enormously unequal wealth growth, monied electoral and political control, corrupt business deregulation, labor union gutting, etc., and their ideological partisans like yourself, would falsely promote the “successes” of a system of economic thievery at its base.
1
So, is Mr. Stephens asking for a choice about whether a country has to be all capitalist or all socialist? I trust he is more intelligent than this. The US, like most industrialized nations, has a mixed economy. Thus, Hickenlooper's answer made complete sense against the horrible prodding of Scarborough. Apparently, Scarborough wants Trump elected again.
Furthermore, there are few mainstream Democrats that want to completely reject capitalism and to suggest otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
I do agree that perception means a lot, but I don't agree that presidential candidates need to dumb down their message for the lowliest of society. Can the general public handle the reality that we are a mixed economy? I believe it can and I would prefer that politicians not assume that I am a moron.
2
Billions of dollars in subsidies to already profitable industries is the current definition of capitalism.
Millions of dollars to help poor and displaced citizens is republican's definition of socialism.
In 2016 a fellow who owned the tobacco store next to my guitar shop asked me what I though of Sanders vs t rump as possible contenders for the presidency. He thought we might finally get to choose whether America was going to be a socialist or a capitalist nation. I replied that that would be a choice between a democratic socialist and a fascist. He begged me to stop the name calling. (Irony there.)
There is more money being hoarded now than has ever before existed in human history yet we see homeless people on every street corner leaving their waste behind. We are seeing children going without three meals a day. We won't rebuild our crumbling bridges and water and sewer treatment facilities. We wring our hands at the idea of a living minimum wage.
The koch bothers don't want a clear air or clean water law because without the laws in place We the People get to pay their costs of doing business in the clean up department. Our taxes are spent on the Navy keeping the shipping lanes open and safe so the koch's can move their oil around the world on our dime. If those costs were considered in the price of gas we would be paying $15.00 a gallon.
Democracy and billionaires do not coexist and the republican party has been very busy lately making it safe for oligarchs.
2
Adam Smith, the man so beloved by "free market capitalists", was in favor of curbing monopolies, regulating banks and a graduated income tax. He, unlike many Republican donors, realized that unbridled greed is not the way a just society should be organized.
2
The Democrats know what they are against, but not what they're for, unless it's progressive Socialism. They can only
hope a recession sets in soon enough to make a difference.
Which it might, led by Europe and China.
It's strange having to openly praise capitalism. It's like praising oxygen in that it's success is utterly ubiquitous relative to any alternative.
Yet capitalism rating is determined by people who have virtually no experience working in industries where one's survival is dependent on public approval: journalists and academics. We should take their "analysis" with grains of salt.
Let's be clear: immigrants come here chiefly for the capitalism. My parents certainly did but they knew the hard work and uncertainty they were getting themselves into, yet our friends in the intelligentsia brand every immigrant to this country as a disempowered hobbled mass victimized by capitalism rather than people who know the game and whose lives, not just financially, have been immeasurably improved.
Capitalism fails when the government does not jail people who take the upside of risks while transferring the downside to the public.It fails when our short-sighted lawmakers cannot see how subsidies often hike the cost of college, medical care and housing.
I want to believe the left-most wing of the party with which I generally align merely want a Nordic social democracy. Yet, AOC can't condemn Maduro and Castro and Bernie's politics haven't changed since he praised the USSR in 1988.
Bret is right that Trump could be cruising to re-election if Dems overplay their socialist hand. Then again, the best part about capitalism is that no matter who is in power the market always has the final say.
2
i think Mr. Stephens neglected to mention the environmental damage done by capitalism, the disgraceful attempts by capitalism to hide the ugly truths about tobacco, unsafe cars, pesticides, banking, etc. etc. etc. What exactly is wrong with the Scandinavian model of democratic socialism, whose people are the happiest and healthiest on the planet?
203
@edward murphy
The problems you describe aren't failures of capitalism, they are failures of politics and government and the legal system to properly define rights and responsibility. The Scandinavian model is fundamentally capitalist with a larger portion of the profits confiscated for public goods.
24
Dear Bret
You are smarter than this. Go back and read Adam Smith about the importance of virtue in a capitalist nation. We do not have that in an economy dominated not by real production but algorithm driven greed in the financial sector.
We are learning again that we need an organized workforce and public policy that brings us back to a true free market. What we have now is the hypocrisy of bailouts, offshore
tax evasion and trade agreements that have devastated manufacturing so now our workers are insecure and competing with exploited workers in third world countries.
Watch Noam Chomsky final lectures on video to learn more.
3
I often wonder what conservatives don't get about their holy capitalism not actually being sacrosanct. The free market system has been liberally leavened by socialistic programs and policies for decades. A Democrat saved the economy from Republican depredations in the early 21st century (thank him for the economy), and now we need a Green New Deal before we all go down together, Brett. The time for unchecked ravages on the planet and equality is OVER.
5
It seems as critical of Trump as Mr. Stephens has been he now as accepted that Trump is going to be unbeatable in 2020. Apparently a corrupt and incompetent administration is not enough to bring the country to immediate demise so Trump is going to be re-elected.
Maybe as powerful as we believe the presidency to be the man in the office is irrelevant, the legislative branch doesn’t need to legislate and the country can run itself. On the other hand maybe another few more years of ineffective government will be enough to bring us down and the rest of the world along with us.
My hope is that stronger and wiser people than those currently controlling the levers of power will emerge, prevail and lead the world to a brighter future.
3
"The most successful economic system" ..."the economy is booming" ... for whom? Half the population is poor (Federal poverty level guideline 2017 is $24,600 revenue per year for a family of 4) or de facto near poor - "paycheck to paycheck." Read Jeffrey Pfeffer's (2018): "Dying for a Paycheck." Millions without health care, unsustainable levels of debt for all: households, businesses, cities, states, nations. Etc.
"Reforming capitalism" ... Roosevelt did that and "saved capitalism." The capitalists have clawed back almost of the his reforms. Reform does not work. You must create a system that does not produce obscene levels of inequality. And all systems, since the Pharoahs, the empires, to this day have generated extreme inequality of wealth and power. It is only catastrophic events that bring inequality down in a society: wars, pandemics, revolutions and collapse (Walter Scheidel 2018 "The Great Leveler"), redistributing power.
Some societies manage to have a durable, humane, enlightened capitalism and stay clear of Adam Smith vile maxim: "All for us , and nothing for the rest." (1776, The Wealth of Nations") Why can't the US?
2
Capitalism is in it’s glory when it’s tempered with a bit of socialism applied intelligently in the right places. Left in it’s purest form it degrades into a blunt instrument
that causes real harm to an increasingly large proportion of the population.
4
True, capitalism fosters creativity, innovation and generates benefit for the nation. However, capitalism in the US for past two decades were hijacked by cartels. Capitalism means true competition among the stakeholders. The dark side started during Reagan era and the greed just went up by million times. It is a common practice to limit competition by kickback or buying out the competitor. There are thousands of examples. Pharma is a great example. Collusion is very common - similar products increase price at the same time so that they continue to loot pockets of patients. They pay off generic makers not to enter in the market. Many corporations making a high profit in US sector moved their manufacturing to other countries so that the executives can earn 10-200 million $ bonus a year. Capitalism has become a dirty word because of the criminal acts by the fat cats. As expected, they kept Congress and Senate spinesless with hefty contribution to their election. Citizen case approval by the corrupt Supreme Court (politically appointed with the support from fat cats) led to the swamp we have today. Capitalism is great if it is practiced in true spirit. We need to restore, not destroy it.
3
The US already has Corporate Socialism - as evidenced by the size of the subsidy to the Amazon office in New York. Why not some for the Little People ?
2
Anytime someone mentions we are the wealthiest country, I get angry. What do we have to show for it. Healthcare for all? First class infrastructure? First world transportation system? Affordable housing? College for all? I don't see affordable healthcare here like in Europe. I don't see high speed rail like in China. Good inexpensive education, like in Scandinavia. What I see are pot holes, expensive limited healthcare options, long commutes, dirty air, unaffordable housing and college, monopolies. A new Guilded era.
3
If we're looking a a label-Democratic capitalist?
A number of Mr. Stephens statements and assumptions need to be qualified. When he says that capitalism is “the most successful economic system,” he should add “up till now.” When he says “capitalism has worked for millions of Americans.” The emphasis is on “Americans.” He doesn’t discuss the impact on the millions around the world living in abject poverty.
What Mr. Stephens fails to acknowledge are the multiple threats to our planet by how the capitalist system produces and consumes goods and services. Capitalism is a system dependent on ever increasing levels of consumption to spur ever more production and ever more capital accumulation. As noted by Wolfgang Streeck, “the wasting of nature for commercial purposes is about to destroy the foundations of life as we know it.” So, the jury is still out on whether the capitalist system is adaptive enough to avoid the long-term destruction of our eco-system.
Some of us Americans enjoy our comfortable life styles, in part, because nearly half of the world lives in poverty, and many of the countries, particularly in Africa, serve as resource reserves for us, the wealthy. If the current levels of per capita resource consumption existing in the US and Europe, encompassed the entire world, how long would our resources hold out? Unfortunately capitalism as an economic system is better suited for extracting, transforming and destroying eco-system values than in conserving, sustaining or restoring them.
4
Let's get some perspective on Morning Joe's journalism. Joe Scarborough was an in-your-face right wing zealot when he swept into the House during the whirlwind of Newt Gingrich's scorched earth policy and voted to impeach Bill Clinton for "lying to the American people." Now Joe is "a serious, hard hitting journalist" who is having some issues with Donald Trump and the Republicans. The makeover is complete, and the message is... whatever works for you at any given moment, go with it.
1
Too many greedy people have been able to purchase our Government. Everything in moderation, please - most especially capitalism.
2
Bret, why are you playing into Donald Trump's latest dog whistle?
So now we are creating a new political litmus test; are you a Capitalist or are you a Socialist?
More absolutes?
To what end?
Bad enough Trump and his enablers will do it.
Our system is a hybrid system Bret.
We both know this.
We can argue about its effectiveness in terms of dealing with the problems of the day, in addition to arguing about the overall effectiveness of specific programs, but it will not change the fact that it is a hybrid system and those programs that are socialist in nature are directly propping up the inadequacies contained within the capitalist parts of our system.
Next, the Soviet Union was in no way a direct reflection of the goals and ideals of Karl Marx. Marx would have been horrified by Lenin and Mao. Nor would he have aligned himself with a Chavez or Maduro.
Personality cults and dictatorships have no relationship to Marxist theory, but those like you still like to promote it as such.
We have made many, many mistakes that lead to the presidency of Trump and the majority of these mistakes rest in how we have interpreted our free market system and how that system willfully creates casualties without thinking about the human cost.
It just self adjusts.
Even Friedrich Hayek believed that for a free market to function as he envisioned, you must first establish a "universal basic income".
Would anyone confuse Hayek with being a Socialist?
Stop playing Trump's game Bret!
4
Capitalism works? Since 1776, works for whom? Has Mr. Bret Stephens ever gone outside? I lay these at Mr. Stephens' slippered feet: Rigid racist segregation, coast to coast. Mass incarceration. Pervasive homelessness. Native "reservations" and relentless poverty. Endless wars for oil, which Stephens championed. And just Endless Wars,with more to come. Back-breaking student debt. Global climate change -- that is a beyond-criminal ruling class crime, of which Stephens is a denier/ collaborator. Three US white guys owning more than the bottom 1/2. Official poverty at 13%, hanging-on-by-the-fingernails near poverty 25%. And of course, Trump.
Who does capitalism work for? Rich white guys. From the start. Rich. White. Guys. Bret L. Stephens, it would seem, is applying to join them.
6
What world are you living in Bret Stephens?
In the world outside, three people hold half of America's total wealth. Some 40 percent of people need foodstanps or charity to survive. Public schools are disappearing. Student debt is crushing lives. Access to medical care is a major difficulty for a majority of citizens. Meanwhile, the tech companies, those paragons of capitalism, are surveilling us and selling our souls to advertisers and political action committees. The environment is being destroyed by the relentless quest for oil and gas. And let's not forget, the overproduction of capitalism and its refusal of regulatory efforts is causing runaway global warming, aka civilizational suicide. This is the best system ever? Only for the filthy rich.
I will vote socialist in 2020. It is time to transform the capitalist system before it kills us all.
4
The most successful economic system? Please. I could say the same about socialism - because as we saw in 2008, socialism bails out capitalism every time capitalism fails.
4
To anyone who has not read "I Love Capitalism," by Ken Langone, one of the founders of Home Depot, I respectfully say "Do It".
C’mon Bret give us a break and spare us the hypocrisy. We all know the US system is capitalism for the working class and welfare for big businesses. Just refer to the bank bailouts, big ag bailouts, air lines. Whenever the capitalist system doesn’t work for big businesses, taxpayers are tapped to restore their lost wealth. We are just asking for the same guard rails for working stiffs.
6
"To the extent that Sanders’s concept of democratic socialism has gained traction, it’s not because capitalism has failed the masses. It’s because Sanders, beyond any of his peers, has consistent convictions and an authentic persona."
Now this is one of the most insidious examples of sophistry that I have seen in months.
First if capitalism... a system where the super rich own everything and loan it at super high interest to all of the other fools..that would be you and me...had not utterly failed the vast majority of Humanity for millions of years, Bret Stephens would not be a stooge for the rich peddling sophistry .
Capitalism, the ownership of anything of value by a very powerful few, is not compatible with Freedom amnd Liberty for All. You need an example... this woman voted because she thought it was O.K. for her to do that. She was sentenced to 5 years in prison. There are hundreds if not thousands of people in privately owned for profit prisons today who were sentenced to a 1 to ten year term for having a marijuana joint on their person and are still there. There's lots more. On the other hand a lifetime criminal who has stolen many, many millions of dollars and participated in "deals" that undoubtedly cost many people their lives in stupid wars received 47 months, and he may be "pardoned" by the arch criminal who supposedly cannot be indicted because he is not just a president but a member of the wealthy capitalist owners of... Wait for it.... Our government.
3
Hickenlooper realizes that many of his would-be supporters have come to sense that Capitalism, as it now exists in this country,is leaving them out.They are not anti- capitalist as you suggest.They just want to change it.They want to share more of the benefits of the glorious system you describe.They don't see "wealth.....being distributed more widely" as you claim.They see monopolies,obscene personal fortunes and growing income inequality instead.The idea that this is a battle between "capitalist and socialist states" is a gross and hackneyed exaggeration.You almost sound like one of Trump's speechwriters.The media knives are out for Bernie Sanders........the "Socialist."Medicare for all and free junior college education are apparently,in your mind,dangerous and socialist ideas.You can only tout the glories of the past so much longer before the future overtakes you.
3
What may work well in Denmark...a tiny, relatively homogenous country where citizens share the same language, culture, and values....will not work in the United States, a massive, ethnically diverse country where citizens do not necessarily share the same language, culture, and values.
Furthermore, according to a recent Yale study, we have over 20 Million foreign nationals living in our country illegally, using our public services, schools, and hospitals etc....and thousands more are coming here every day. Until that problem is addressed, Denmark’s ‘socialist’ model will never fly here.
Bret:
Wild and unhindered capitalism is dangerous and unfair (check)
Right now USA has social programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (check)
USA has the best Universities in the world but has a collapsed educational system (check)
USA has the best hospitals in the world but one of the worst Health Care Systems in the world (check)
Now – what is wrong with incorporating social programs in those two important issues for a healthier society? – Altruistic societies will eventually overcome selfish ones. (check)
I urge you to read “The Social Conquest of Earth” by Edward O. Wilson – (check)
I am not sure why the fact that people under capitalism routinely have to work "70, 80, 90 hours a week to build the business" is so frequently touted as an argument in favor of capitalism. Anyone who has ever worked that number of hours knows it is miserable. Human life should be more than just work.
3
good analysis. the only improvementcwould be to distinguish between free market capitalism and crony or state capitalism. free market capitalism is NOT unrestrained capitalism. it is restrained by various laws which prohibit the knowing damage that can be done to the consumer (eg., the real offense committed by a corporation is not the unintended harm its product caused but rather the fact that the corporation was aware of the harm and did nothing to correct it.
Neither capitalism or socialism are precisely one thing. They both have ranges and both can be designed by law to be ways to organize society constructively or destructively. Our country needs a leader who can ask wise economists how to define our system to use both capitalist and socialist ideas to construct a fair and just system.
2
Of course capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in the history of the world. Yes, unrestrained capitalism causes great income inequality, poverty and social unrest. Socialism, in its pure sense, involves government ownership and control of all of the "means of production," i.e. factories, transportation, retail outlets, financial institutions etc. Neither pure system exists in the United States or Western Europe.
The argument about whether capitalism or socialism is appropriate now is a fallacy. The United States does not now, nor will it ever have a purely socialist system. We do have a free enterprise system (capitalism) with a largely regulated economy with some socialist elements. The arguments raised by the new Democratic freshmen & women are designed to score economic points and not to debate the real economic issues.
These issues involve the taxation power of the Federal Government ("tax the rich"), increasing the amount of federal regulation of business and state & local government activity; and extending greater civil rights to various identified groups. No issue of a complete federal takeover of all business, banks and other economic institutions are advocated by anybody in power, at least so far.
Maybe we should be more careful in the way we phrase our advocacy points to persuade others to vote for our policies. The United States has not become a great economic power by restricting the ability of its citizens to succeed.
3
It should be noted, Mr. Stephens, that the capitalism borne out of FDR's New Deal that led to the greatest economic benefit to the greatest number of people in American history, is not the "capitalism" being practiced today. You are conflating the two.
Essentially, we can evolve or fade away. Capitalism is not a perfect system any more than Social Security was a perfect program when it was first created. Yet, the vast majority will rip your head off if you try to take their Social Security away.
A microscopic portion of the human race possesses and takes advantage of any number of tools unavailable to the rest of us, helping to create the vast inequity we see today. Jared Kushner, as one example, is legally able to pay no taxes year after year after year after year. I wonder how the laws got to be that way? How is it that members of congress, upper and lower houses both, can trade in equities that are being influenced by legislation they may be writing, as they are writing that legislation?
And my very favorite conservative, capitalist, fairy tale is this one Mr. Stephens: Corporations are people. I have to hand it to you people. That's some creative capitalism.
So Brett? We're not looking to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But capitalism isn't a baby any longer either. It's a young adult now. It needs a shower and a new change of clothes. Badly. The greatest number of us can't tolerate the filth and stench any longer.
5
Mr. Stephens is always confident and occasionally right.
Mr. Stephens calls Singapore "hyper-capitalist." This, despite the fact that Singapore has extremely strong support network for housing, health care, and education. Perhaps Mr. Stephens is the one who does not understand the subtleties and real meaning of the words socialism and capitalism.
1
The problem here is labels. Capitalism is NOT the same as the pursuit of wealth. Nor is it a synonym for entrepreneurialism or even free enterprise. People have always pursued wealth, using trades of goods and services for money, long before the term capitalism was introduced in the late 1700s. And very few -- if any -- economies have ever been completely free or state controlled. Certainly not America. Capitalism is really best defined as the use of money to make money. It involves an economic engine that is separated from the actual production or even sale of goods. Now, that doesn't mean it is bad. At its best it is a tremendous accelerant for economic activity. But, partly because of this very useful quality, it also accelerates inequality of wealth and over-specialization which inevitably result in boom and bust cycles. Easing the pain of the busts is where socialism comes in. Through taxes and infrastructure (which include education and health care), there is a greater chance that more people will benefit from the booms. America has ALWAYS been a socialist country to the extent that its government has actively worked to promote growth -- whether it was discounts for homesteads or subsidies for railroads. Countries like Denmark are more socialist than we are and China is less capitalist than we are. But both rely an elements of each system.
A good part of the problem is "a thriving economy (check)." The better question is, is the economy doing its job. I think the answer is a clear resounding NO! But most Democrats and all Republicans don't want to ask that question.
It is not doing its job because there are so many working people unable to earn a living wage and because so many people are looking at a future that is worse than their parents experienced. Well those are just a few of the problems.
Capitalism works great where there are markets (buyers and sellers with bargaining power). Socialism works great when there is no meaningful market and there is an important social interest in the activity (public roads, public defense, public safety). In between there are a variety of industries where various levels of regulation preserve the incentives of capitalism while tempering its excesses. Honest, principled debate focuses on where an activity falls in the spectrum, e.g. health care (anyone every try to get bids for the treatment for injuries while unconscious after a traffic accident?)
It is mind boggling that we have pathetically simpleminded debate in which people shout "capitalism" is sole solution or "socialism" is the sole solutions.
The potential genius of the American system is "democratic capitalism," the blending of capitalism and socialism. IMHO the central planning during WWII was excess (perhaps necessary for the time), but the pendulum has swung too far toward unchecked feudal capitalism. Its refreshing to hear John Hickenlooper promote an intelligent return to the center.
3
Brian, just one major disagreement. The Central Planning during WWII was not excessive. It was an intrinsic and totally necessary way of harnessing the economic might of the US for the simple purpose of winning that total conflict.
"The Most Successful Economic System"--news flash: China now has the largest economy measured by purchasing power parity. Since the 2008 recession, China has grown by 6-7%, and is responsible for 40% of world economic growth. GDP went from $300 billion in 1980 to $11 trillion in 2015. Republican World Bank President Zoellick rightfully called China's progress in lifting half a billion people out of poverty "the greatest leap to overcome poverty in history." Life expectancy has doubled since 1950, literacy rates have gone from 20% to 95%. China is about to surpass the US in R&D spending. It files twice as many patent applications as the US. Mr. Stephens, what nation has that "most successful economic system" you describe?
The US has capitalism. The US just doesn't have free enterprise. Banks don't compete. Nor do cell phone companies, airlines, cable companies. The list goes on and on. In China, the government controls too much of business. In the US, business controls too much of government. In the past 40 years, China has had the most successful economic system in human history.
2
Capitalism is not one system but a family of systems, much like Christianity is a family of churches with a rather divergent range of beliefs.
A measure of a system's performance is concentration of wealth. We actually have a proven, reliable, and widely used metric for that, the Gini index, and it shows that over time inequality is worsening. US Gov data: Gini Index of Money Income and Equivalence-Adjusted Income: 1967 to 2014, https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2015/demo/gini-index-of-money-income-and-equivalence-adjusted-income--1967.html .
There are actually two trends in parallel. One is the super-concentrationof wealth to the top. Sure, people should be rewarded for risk and success but the actual dollar figures have mote to do with politics of the tax code rather than actual performance. Nothing wrong with fixing that.
The other is the separation of lower, mostly high school, earners, from college level earners together with geographical concentration. That will become a problem and, although it is a very hard problem it must be addressed. Major public investment in all levels of education,financed from our taxes, would help.
Oh, and we are driving climate change and it's hitting us hard already. Education and addressing climate change are our "Man on the Moon" moments. Don't say GOP.
1
1. Unlike Mr. Stephens, Hickenlooper has actually started and run a business, met a payroll, and made himself a millionaire in the process of providing to the public things the public values. Mr. Stephens might be silent and listen.
2. Anyone who knows Hickenlooper will readily acknowledge that he doesn't like labels - especially squishy labels like capitalism or socialism. We are all capitalists just as we are all socialists. These things are not opposites in our present era but interlinked complementary tools to providing good and services to the public, allocating scarce resources and allowing collective priorities determine outcomes.
3. Meanwhile, in "capitalist" America, we all continue to subsidize corporation misbehavior, greed, and misfeasance, leaving increasingly large outcomes in the hands of a tiny few who benefit from such a rigged -- and unsustainable -- system.
Hush, Mr. Stephens so you can learn something.
7
@JDS
Superb comment. Too bad that too many Americans are more invested in superficial political team sporting than actually thinking. But this is nothing new. Your two sentences starting with “We are all...” should be won billboards throughout the country.
1
In colonial Philadelphia, there was no fire department. Each fire insurance company had its own private fire department. When you bought insurance, you got a medallion to put on your house. If a fire truck from the Green Tree company came to a burning house that had a Penn Mutual medallion, they would let it burn to the ground. After this happened a few times, a municipal fire department was established, a socialized fire department. I imagine that the people who lived in brick houses gripped about paying for the people who lived in wooden ones.
What Conservatives fail to realize is that some things like police and fire protection are best done by cooperation, by government, while some things are best done by individuals or businesses. Their problem is that they cannot distinguish one from the other.
8
Bret Stephens seems to suffer from an inability to differentiate 3 distinct aspects of what he wants to call capitalism. The modern American economy combines:
* entrepeneurialism (that is, the ease with which new for-profit (and not-for-profit) ventures may be started)
* "free" markets (in which what is for sale and at what price is substantively left to buyers and sellers)
* private, distributed ownership of corporations (entities with limited liability)
All human activities involve some mixture of labor, intellectual property ("ideas!") and capital. What is unique about capitalism is not any of the three features mentioned above. Rather, it is the specific way in which the risks and more notably (due to limited liability) the rewards of corporate (that is, non-individual) activities are distributed.
It isn't hard to imagine a society/economy in which all 3 of the features I mentioned are present, but the dominance of worker owned cooperatives totally changes the way that the profits/dividends of economic activity are distributed.
"Loving capitalism" means one thing and one thing only: preferring the highly asymmetric distribution of risks/rewards in favor of those who invest capital (rather than labor or IP) in limited liability corporate activity.
We can have a thriving, entrepeneurial, free-market, largely private economy without preferring capital. Such an economy would have most/all of the benefits of the current one, but would not be "capitalism"
3
There are certain conservatives, like Stephens and Ross Douthat, who are embarrassed by Trump’s personality and character, but favor what has been achieved during his presidency, whether that be tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, unconditional support of Israel’s right wing government, or appointment of judges who will oppose legal abortion and other threats to conservative sexual mores and gender roles. As the election draws nearer, we can expect these pundits to put aside their distaste for Trump and take up anti-Democratic and Pro-Trump talking points.
6
Mr. Stephens makes some good points, BUT he is out of phase with the facts on the ground, or in the pocket books and balance sheets of most American homes because income inequality has been worsening since the 1970's as has asset inequality. For the post-Baby Boomers, each generation cumulatively faces worse economic prospects even though unemployment is now low and there have been some recent gains in wages. For proof see articles this week in the Times Business Section. Second, I would like to see what reforms Mr. Stephens proposes under the present circumstances to make capitalism work better in America for everyone. I will his reforms be more of the same neoliberal, trickle down policies that have caused the current inequalities? If not, will they be too socialistic for his ideology? What say you, Mr. Stephens?
1
What makes capitalism so hard to get giddy about is that the numbers you site - the low unemployment rate and the high wage growth - are especially remarkable because ten years ago unemployment was frighteningly high and bankruptcies were at an all time high. These kind of wild extremes, inherent in capitalism - effect the poor and middle-class disproportionately. Their homes were lost, their lives were ruined, their careers irreparably damaged.
The wealthy have the financial insulation to ride out the hard times and the wild swings and can afford to pop open the champagne when the numbers get good again. It's the wealthy and the secure who use graphs and percentage points to bang the capitalist drum and beat the rest of us into submission.
2
Capitalism that Mr Stephens refers to led to great depression, which led straight to WW2. After a short reprieve from that Capitalism, no doubt fueled by fears of complete Socialist takeover emanating from the Soviet Union and China, the Thatcher/Reagan revolution reasserted the madness. And there we are again, except in the nuclear world. The blissful reset, previously offered by WW2, would be very likely to end the civilization as we know it.
The election of Donald Trump did indeed serve as a clarifying moment. The United States ceased to be an example of virtue and is rapidly becoming an example of a cesspool. The same for the UK, incidentally. The rest will just be the consequences.
3
Mr Stephens, the “most successful economic system” in the world has evolved to a level of income inequality the likes of which not seen since the gilded age if not the Roman Empire. In fact I hesitate to call the obscene concentration and consolidation of business in fewer and fewer hands Capitalism at all. My city often reminds me of certain streets in Delhi when I last visited. Far too often in times of crisis be it climate change, income inequality, or the crisis in the Middle East you rise to defend the status quo which in this case is a modest rise of economic data fails to reflect the true economic pain felt by tens of millions of Americans. The center will not hold.
No one running for US office is a socialist. Period, full stop.
Mr Stephens is playing the same semantic game, from a different angle. Either smear your opponent by mis-labeling them ‘socialist’; or, force them to embrace the equally-charged mislabel of ‘capital’.
Mr Stephens cites economic milestones which he thinks place capitalism in a glowing light. Rubbish. Wage *growth* may be at 10-year high, but wages are historically low, and most new jobs’ wages do not permit the employed to live, requiring many to hold multiple jobs, just to survive. And our dislocations in wealth rival those of The Gilded Age.
Capitalism abhors underutilization. Major portions of our economy — transportation, energy, farming — face fundamental dislocations in the next decade, which will cannibalize the demand for labor. Yet Mr Stephens pastes wallpaper over the gaping holes in his sense of the drywall of our economy.
The battle in America is not capitalism vs socialism. It is whether we plunge further down the rabbit hole of a neo-Gilded Age. With politicians and judges, bought by the wealthiest, pushing us ever further toward an Ayn Rand, libertarian dystopia. With every public aspect of a formerly democratic society (land, education, roads, emergency services, social security, and so forth) controlled by merchant-prince ‘capitalists’. Or not.
For Mr Stephens, I recommend a re-read of Adam Smith. ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is not a paean to libertarianism.
4
I guess Mr. Stephens hasn't noticed that "capitalism" appears to be at war with democracy and capitalism is winning. Capitalists are trying to enshrine interpretations of the Constitution that give money ("capital") more rights than human beings.
Some opinion writers and talking heads on TV forget that capitalism unfettered by good sense and morality will always create monopolies that seek to squash competition to preserve their advantages. Just as single party states squash their political opponents. Unfortunately there are no Constitutional rights when it comes to capitalism, no free speech, nothing.
So the next time some pundit wants to play inquisitor and demand allegiance to "capitalism" someone needs to point out that nothing is perfect and just about everything can be corrupted. Capitalism is no angel and pretending it has no faults is dangerous and foolhardy.
1
You miss the point about "socialism" and what it means in current Democratic Party politics. Sanders was quite explicit about this in 2016: His "democratic socialism" is not in opposition to capitalism. For Sanders and tens of millions of Americans socialism means capitalism + fairness + common sense regulation + progressive taxation + government policy that guarantees basic social rights such as affordable health care, affordable child care, affordable housing, and a living wage.
2
Fantastic editorial. Mr. Stephens is increasingly the only voice of the rational majority (center/center right) in these pages.
Mr. Cohen in his opposing view extols the virtues of Socialism via the example of France.
His only criticism of the critically ill French economic and political situation is a s a throw away line mentioning "high unemployment" and a scant mention of "yellow vests". Let me fill some gaps Mr. Cohen:
1. How about that there is a 25% of French youth is unemployed which has been persistent almost a quarter of a century
2. How about mentioning chronic strikes that shut down the entire country on a regular basis
3. How about major riots in based on racial/socio economic stagnation in major urban centers
4. How about the fact that long before the emergence of Trump the social and economic malaise in France had given rise to a racist/fascist party that now easily commands 40% of populace.
"Democratic" Socialism (we are very grateful that he is not proposing to enslave us permanently via Soviet style Socialism) is indeed a mainstay in countries across Europe. I love Europe and like to visit often but unlike Mr. Cohen I vastly prefer our dynamic, socially mobile, entrepreneurial and yes capitalist American system. If Mr. Cohen doesn't believe these facts let's just ask any potential immigrants on where they would prefer to end up: Socialist France (or Sweden etc.) or the capitalist US. The results wouldn't be close.
1
There's nothing wrong with capitalism. There's a lot wrong with unchecked capitalism. That's why we have government, that's why we control commerce across state lines, used to keep monopolies in check and indict public servants who get paid by businesses to sway government action.
Republican theory has it that government has to die so that we can be free to steal from each other. Their only response to being called on their crimes is to cry "socialism".
If you can't argue on the merits of your position, then you have to attack the credibility of the opponent. That's all they have.
3
Scarborough was clearly posing a "Gotcha" question. He modified "capitalist" with "proud"--implying that capitalism and its "opposite," socialism are mutually exclusive. He also phrased it in a way that only invited a "yes" or "no" answer. Hickenlooper's choice was either to hedge, as he did, and look indecisive OR to say "Of course I am but I am also proud of policies that are getting labeled 'socialist' these days, such as Obamacare...."
TV and radio talk shows are NOT designed to illuminate or solve problems. They are designed to inflame and attract ratings. So don't just blame the poor schnooks who need the publicity to get their campaigns off the ground!
2
This is in response to both this (Bret Stephens') and Roger Cohen's columns. Yes, I get it, unbridled Capitalism and hard left Socialism (i.e., Communism or Communism-light) are bad and not desired in this, the 21st Century America of global markets and multinational corporations. The BIG question, then, is how do the Democrats not shoot themselves (and the rest of the country) in the foot by nominating a candidate (again) that can not de-throne Trump. Suggestion: DO NOT treat the US voters as children with ADHD and short attention spans - be clear how your administration would be different than Trump's and be specific. Then explain why your position is better. Give the voter a clear choice, but don't create bogeymen. While the media likes the 30 sec sound bite, resist the temptation to over-simplify. Tell Americans what in Capitalism needs to be reformed and what in Socialism is too far. Do not get in the mud with Trump, the pig always wins! I believe that most Americans are still centrists at heart (maybe now left-center rather than right-center) and will appreciate a positive campaign that focuses on how policies will benefit them (yes, all politics is local and people vote their pocketbooks), and know that simple answers are generally not the right answer. Be honest, don't be afraid to disagree with someone in a conversation of policy, be positive and be authentic. Allow the voter to feel good about voting for you and not just relieved to vote against Trump.
3
Has Bret Stephens noticed that what he wants Democrats to say is *exactly* what Elizabeth Warren says? “I’m a capitalist down to the bottom of my toes” she has said. Her entire message is that the opportunity created by capitalism needs to be extended more widely.
2
A minor point in Stephen’s essay is paramount. Stephens reminds the reader that “Nordic countries” are NOT SOCIALIST. Bernie Sanders is responsible for the self-destructive confusing of the terms “socialist” and “social democracy.” I don’t believe Sanders when he says that he is a “Democratic Socialist.” Bernie is a straight up Social Democrat. France and Denmark, Canada and New Zealand aren’t socialist—the government does not own the means of production, nor even significant portions. They use tax revenues to support robust social programs. Placed on a political spectrum France and the USA aren’t that far apart. We spend a huge % of every federal dollar on social security and Medicare. Progressives would like to use social wealth to create a better social safety net and transform our economy such that 48% of the populace stops making so little money that they don’t even qualify to pay federal taxes, while the top 10% increasingly gets a larger slice of the pie. To get there you have to counter the myth that “trickle-down” works best when the economy is least taxed. That’s the cutting edge of the debate in America: what tax system provides the greatest benefit to the greatest number without stifling economic growth and innovation? That fine debate has nothing to do with capitalism versus socialism. That’s a right-wing PR coup, largely Bernie’s fault, and Stephens essay merely perpetuates it—intentionally?
4
Again, very accurate observations. We, the Democrats, better get in touch with reality. We need to promote changes to our current system, not blowing it up. I want the thoughtful voices of the party to speak up and not be afraid of the progressive voices on the left who in reality do not represent anything more that community activists who without the financial support of the affluence capitalists, would be working for Howard Schultz at $9/hour as baristas.
2
There is nothing wrong with capitalism that a good swift dose of common sense wouldn't fix. When capitalism runs rampant over the health, safety and lives of the people, then it should be brought under control and some of that wealth distributed to those who contributed to it. Like workers. Like the society that built the infrastructure. Like consumers who will die if they cannot afford the billionaire's drug made in many cases by publicly funded universities.
Capitalists don't get mega rich on their own anyway. The current system "rewards" capitalists with tax breaks, subsidies, preferential deals, suspiciously lucrative contracts with friends of politicians handing out the people's largesse.
Rampant capitalism in this era has led to rampant corruption. In D.C., the only way to get things, or to get things done, is to make "campaign contributions" which some might call bribes.
The government often supports the businesses which made rich people unfathomably rich. The rich should share some of that wealth for the good of the society because it is the moral and right thing to do and it will make everybody feel better about that seemingly undeserved wealth, including the rich themselves.
As to Hickenlooper? A day out and his cringe-making waffle is disqualifying if, for no other reason, the man can't think on his feet.
2
I tend to agree with the point of this column. But I don't think it is fair to deem it improper to call Denmark "socialist" while at the same time painting the left as "socialist."
It's a bait and switch. When those on the left in this country say "socialist" they mean something like Denmark. Not the USSR or Venezuela. If Mr. Stephens is going to use "socialist" in a way that excludes European systems with quite substantial social safety nets, he cannot fairly use the same word to describe those to his left.
But of course this isn't about being fair and engaging the actual positions of opponents, it's about winning. I don't expect better from political hacks or Trumpists. I did expect better of Mr. Stephens. But this isn't the first column he has made this rhetorical slide to score points, but make the ideas intellectual mush. I guess I expected too much intellectual integrity here.
More substantively, I consider myself a capitalist. My worry isn't that we have too much capitalism but that we don't have enough--or that our sort of capitalism betrays the system. It's becoming a crony capitalism that doesn't provide equality of opportunity, or even opportunity, to most.
That's a problem. Part of the solution is an expanded safety net, but a big part is making our capitalism work again. The biggest threat to real capitalism is it's failure to function properly, which will lead a generation in search of alternatives. That's something worth talking about.
2
Capitalism - I've been a business guy, entrepreneur since the mid-70s. It's the way we do capitalism today in the U.S. that is THE problem. We might call it "predatory" capitalism where many in business - from the banks (think Wells Fargo cheating and stealing millions of their customers for a few more $ and then the CEO was caught and given $100million bonus instead of jail time).
Your pocket is being picked - by someone trying to make ever more money - for every last nickel, from the womb to the tomb.
The current way we do capitalism is destroying life and the natural world. Extreme short sightedness and extreme individualism are the fundamental roots of virtually all our core challenges and if we do not change, and soon, Bret and all his right wing buddies will be on board with the rest of us as the Titanic - America and the world, goes down.
Maximization of short term profits at ALL costs is an ignorant way to run an economy and society. Valuing more money, especially for those with plenty already, over the adding to the well being of life and the natural world is not only devoid of any wisdom, but is completely devoid of love, courage and truth.
Bret - you seem to deny the realities of our time. Good luck to us all.
4
it is interesting that the activists in the socialist contingent of the Democratic party are mostly wealthy including a large number of trust funders, billionaire private equity and hedge fund moguls who were big beneficiaries of the financial bailout. Their real message to the rest of us is to privatize gains and socialize losses.
We are the wealthiest economy, but what good is that if none of that wealth is going to the people who produced it. Sure incomes are high today, but in my case, if you factor in inflation, I make less than I did 20 years ago. Last year I received a 1% raise (1% higher than the year before) while the CEO bought a new 6 figure Mercedes. Unrestricted Capitalism, deregulation, and corruption got us here. Now it's time for the people to take back the power as well as the wealth we created.
4
The takeaway from professional member of the Republican Commentariat Brett Stephens’ column is this: Republicans are seriously frightened that they will lose their ill-gotten power in 2020 and have pulled together to push the Party’s dishonest story line against Democrats. The Republican elite has zero interest in reforming capitalism so it works for all Americans, and I am sure Stephens understands that. For him, and the rest of Republicans, Party comes first, country a distant second.
The economy was already doing well under Obama, not that any Republican prole remembers that. The Stock Market was down last year after nine years of steady increase. Last month’s jobs report showed a dismal 20,000 new jobs, not enough to make up for new workers entering the job market.
The bottom line is, Republicans have proven during their years of controlling the House and Senate, and two years controlling all three branches of government, that they have no ideas beyond redistributing wealth upward from the working middle class and poor to their donor class. Republican elites like the Koch brothers and Walton family have eased their suppression of wages and employment, used to slow the recovery under Obama from the Republican Great recession and secure a Republican presidency. If they succeed in scamming a sufficient number of un/disinformed Americans into giving their Party total power, does any honest person believe they will continue to share those crumbs with their workers?
3
Of course Hickenlooper squirmed in his seat when he was asked if he was a proud capitalist.He has the same problem that many capitalists have reconciling that in this fine capitalistic country 21 % of the children live below the poverty line.True capitalists may also,be disturbed that the United States rates 13th in live births.Japan and Germany, both Capitalistic, allow,a child a better chance at life. We have to admit that our Capitalism has some flaws-if we are just waiting for the cash to flow into our pockets we are sabotaging the benefits of Capitalism.Fix the problems before labeling others as socialists-that is the easy way out.
3
...and again, and again, and again... we had a much fairer system back in the 90's. I realize that that was so, so long ago, but I think that if we are looking at a good place to start - that ain't so radical - then th 90's should be IT.
1
China is not a Democracy. Saudi Arabia wants to be more like China and doesn't want to become a Democracy. What is it about democracies that makes countries like Saudi Arabia and China fear becoming a Democracy? Having to implement a welfare state for everyone, and not a privileged few, must be the answer. Capitalism isn't the problem - acting democratically and giving all citizens freedom of choice is seen as undesirable by China and Saudi Arabia.
SPOT ON ARTICLE!
My letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer published 2/22, "Capitalism, Socialism Can Coexist" (I meant to say NORTH Korea):
The problem with the socialism debate is semantics. I view myself as a socialist capitalist. I cheer when my stocks go up when the company is prospering and it shares profits with employees. Most don’t. Instead, they use tax cuts for stock buybacks that artificially boost price, and CEOs sell. Bad.
Most people live paycheck by paycheck. Why? They pay taxes and high insurance premiums while some expensive medications aren't covered. The cost of education is burdening our children’s future. My steroid inhaler cost $168.
My daughter received two masters degrees from an excellent French school for $15,000. Something's wrong with this picture.
I would gladly pay higher taxes for quality free education and medical care. When the word socialism gurgles up, people envision life in Cuba or South Korea. I see happy people in Scandinavia. We need to calmly rethink the true meanings of socialism and capitalism.
5
I would surmise it depends upon how capitalism is defined. If it includes the right for corporate America to buy the politician it favors, then it is a blight on society. If it encourages startups and new jobs, then it is a plus. By itself, without a mix of socialism, it becomes a danger to many in our society.
The author points to wage growth, which much of it comes just from state initiated minimum wage increases. But he does not answer the question of why forty percent of the population cannot meet a $400 emergency.
We have already socialized much of our society. With Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the interstate highway system, law enforcement, fire protection, National Parks and Forests, every level of government, libraries, public schools, etc.
You get the picture.
There is room for both.
4
The defect in Stephens’ otherwise sensible paean to “capitalism” is his blinkered selection of economic indicators. So-called unemployment rates count part-timers as “employed” they ignore underemployment, and the number of people who must work 2 or 3 jobs to survive. Stephens should have noted that 2018 median family incomes and family wealth scarcely exceed 1970s-level median incomes and wealth (if they do at all). The distributions of income and wealth have skewed sharply upward.
American capitalism has transformed over the last 50 or so years to a form based less on genuine productivity increases to a form based more on financial manipulation — note the vast increase in the fraction of the economy consumed by the financial sector. Talking in broad-brush terms about “capitalism” buries critical information and perspectives.
I hope Mr. Stephens will revisit such economic issues with a broader, and thus more realistic, perspective.
7
The issue, Bret, is not that capitalism is bad. The issue is that it has gotten to the point that it no longer works for most everyone other than the enormously wealthy. And it's gotten that way due to influences that have distorted market-driven capitalism beyond recognition: the huge inflow of money into the political process; special interest legal protections that stymie entrepreneurship, and catastrophic household, student and government debt.
Capitalism works for the widest possible benefit when it is reasonably regulated to insure a continuing balance of societal needs, which is how European nations have managed to do, and the U.S. has not.
Put another way, capitalism works well when business, politicians and the general population believe in and support a light but firm government role. That's what we don't have, Bret. What we do have is animosity towards government, hatred to taxes, and paralyzing political discord in which the parameters of discussion (as in the future of health care) are defined by those who control the levers of economic power -- insurance companies, corporate healthcare behemoths, closed market medicine, and an inability to rein in costs.
If you want candidates to describe themselves as "proud capitalists," then let's focus on making capitalism something to be proud of.
6
This discussion avoided the real problem. Is capitalism compatible with a representative democracy? The Great Recession should have taught us that question is one of the most important questions every economist, media commentator, and politician should be asked every day.
If we are to object to democratic socialism as preferred by so many of today's young citizens and politicians, as well as a few stalwarts, we must discuss what an economic and social and political system based upon democratic capitalism would look like.
Apparently those discussing capitalism do not wish to connect it to democracy. Why?
4
No, 2020 will be a referendum on the president. THAT is the choice.
As for reforming capitalism, that is what each and every Democrat is advocating. Not a single one actually nationalizes anything (not even Medicare for All does that). Taxes are not socialism. Regulations are not socialism. That’s the right characterizes them as such shows just how accustomed very wealthy entities have become to acting without consequence; capturing the vast bulk of gains for themselves and transferring risk to the general population as much as possible.
If Stephens wants a regulated/reformed capitalist system, great! So do I. So does Sanders. So does Warren. So does Harris. So do we all.
9
Bret seems to be allergic to nuance and hung up on obsolete labels. Where does he think fundamental breakthroughs in aviation, information technology, medicine came from? The government. But that would be admitting to planning or..."socialism."
Successful? In some ways, yes; in important other ways like preserving the ecosystem services we depend on, no.
As Chouinard of Patagonia said, "there's no business (or capitalism) to be done on a dead planet." Preventing that is the task of our and children's lifetimes. Forms of capitalism might be salvageable and even helpful. There are a lot of ideas out there for doing so (like restorative economics or Purpose-driven companies). But you have to be willing to junk the name-calling, quick judgments, closed mindsets, excess certainty; and begin to explore the possibilities.
3
There is no center right for a center left to partner with. Whose fault is that? The pendulum must swing to the left to pull the center back. Moderates on the right who want the center to hold must hold their noses and vote left. They must rebuke the extremist right soundly. Then they can work to rebuild a moderate center. There is no other way.
1
Ex-Governor Hickenlooper could have replied, " I am a Capitalist, but I am not for unrestrained Capitalism." The mystery is why he became evasive and tongue tied instead of rendering a straight forward answer.
3
One reason why I stopped subscribing to the Wall Street Journal was the disconnect between their excellent reporting and their editorial screeds.
Bret Stephens writes about the need to "reform" Capitalism while the editorial opposite refers to Mitch McConnell single-handily impeding all such reform.
Irony is alive and well.
5
We do not have capitalism as Adam Smith envisioned it because capitalism has many producers and competiton between them keeps prices low. We instead have a version of oligopoly which gives greater returns to producers.
4
Mr. Stephens, THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD ARE SOCIAL DEMOCRACIES.
6
Whom and by what measure? If you are going to attempt to make an argument then at least back it up. I am so tired of people voicing their opinions with no basis to support them. In this case, I doubt you could so you didn’t.
How is it "proud capitalism" when companies will deal with the power brokers of cities across the country only on the condition that tax breaks are promised, infrastructure provided at no cost to these "proud capitalist" companies and other inducements paid for by the working stiffs whose labors keep a community running and whose tax dollars seem to always look like bribes to rich individuals and corporations to lure their "proud capitalist" enterprises to set up business within the city limits of their towns?
How is it "proud capitalism" when business owners pool their dollars and work hours to expand their grip on the resources (read: all of the above plus the labor pool) of their community?
Class socialism is a more precise and accurate description. But that's hard to be proud of, isn't it?
4
Oh, but there is a huge difference between Denmark (or Germany, France, Netherlands, ...) and the US.
People over there still believe in tax money for better infrastructure and public services. The US looks old and tired, with its antiquated metro systems, 1990s style buses (compared to Europe), above ground utility and electricity poles, high speed trains that go slower than regular trains in Europe, narrow sidewalks, traffic lights everywhere, painted or no bike lanes, you get the picture.
Healthcare in the US is shameful, public schools and colleges with extortionate tuition fees a rich and upper middle class instrument for social mobility prevention.
That is what people are reacting against. Semantics or “gotcha” lines cherry picked from candidate programs or interviews are not going to change people’s opinion. They know we’re on the wrong path.
13
We may be the wealthiest country, with some of the wealthiest people, but we’re also a country where the wage gap has astronomically grown and where inequality has similarly increased. We ought to be the most equitable country, the fairest country. Wealth is A metric. It’s not THE metric, especially not of a country that claims to be one of the most Christian countries. Democracy is about access & equity, not Darwinian inequality where the wealthier you are, the more outsized your influence is. I’m a retired Air Force officer and literally have my life where my mouth is. I’m a patriot. And I mourn the gradual erosion of what once was truly one of the most democratic countries in the world. Stop focusing on wealth and start focusing on equality & equity.
10
Why does Brett think that we need to fully believe in one ism? Capitalism left on it's own leads to uneven distribution of wealth while socialism left to itself leads to inefficiency. It has to be a policy that works for a given situation. Health care and other policies such as minimum wage and taxation to control inequality have proven to work better with socialism but overall economy runs better with Capitalism. Just looking at growth by itself as a proof of Capitalism's success is flawed. Where the wealth is going also needs to be kept into account
2
@Harryg
Socialism leads to inefficiency ?
What about bankruptcy and cessation of innovation ?
1
If it's OK to talk about smoothing the rough edges of capitalism to keep it respectable, how about figuring out how to smooth the rough edges of socialism?
I am in favor of having an economy that serves the social fabric of the country. That puts me closer to socialism than to capitalism
3
Hickenlooper was right not to fully endorse capitalism and not to fully reject socialism. Capitalism is efficient at creating wealth, and there's a lot of good to being wealthy as a society. The problem, and it's a problem that has a good chance at literally being the downfall of humanity, is that producers don't pay the full price of production--namely, the cost to the environment. Regulation can be onerous, but strong regulation is absolutely necessary (before the clean water act, you couldn't swim in the great lakes or eat the fish caught there, and before the EPA breathing in LA could be lethal). The costs of fighting climate change need to be borne by the polluters, but we're way behind the curve here, and we need massive policy change.
Bottom line, capitalism is fatal long-term. Straight socialism lacks the efficiency (incentives) to produce wealth. An intelligent fusion of the two is the workable solution. Easier said than done, but we need to quit worshipping capitalism and demonizing socialism.
6
"There is a difference between taming a horse and shooting it". So very true. Too bad that Mr. Stevens proceeds to misguide the less informed readers by conflating the long dead horse of central planning and state's violent take over of private property - with European style capitalism where - contrary to the indeed practically wealthiest country of USA where wealth is disproportionately concentrated - wealth is distributed more evenly. Please look at what the difference is in health care and student debt between these alleged "socialist" countries and the USA. Soviets were famous for murdering social democrats, thus developed USSR. It was for fear of that type of society that tamed European capitalism's horse. We need to fear the revolt of disenfranchised who most recently elected Trump but also elected in the past National Socialists. Please don't mess with our heads. You know better.
Bret Stephens brings Denmark into the conversation about Socialism versus Capitalism, then glibly skips past into his fact starved opinion piece. Denmark has balanced the ideas of Socialism and Capitalism very differently than America. A well run healthcare system keeps Danes healthier and longer lived than Americans for almost half the cost per person. College education is very cheap and available to everyone. Supports for poor and unemployed people are strong and people receiving it are not made to feel degraded. In these kinds of ways, Denmark uses Socialist ideas to better balance society. At the same time, its Capitalist business sector thrives. American politicians, calling for things like Medicare for all, are not calling for an end to Capitalism, but rather, a better balance. The distance between the rich and the poor is so much greater here and the ability of the poor to stay healthy and get the kind of education that will help them succeed, without incurring tremendous debt, is so much more daunting than it ought to be in the richest country in the world. Perhaps the biggest difference, today, between Denmark and America, is their greater belief in their ability to work through their government to achieve better lives for themselves and each other. A belief that is sorely lacking in America.
3
The measures used by Mr. Stephens to suggest that are going okay under Trump fail to consider that the American experiment is in mortal danger. Trump, a con man par excellence, managed to cloud the minds of sufficiently large numbers of people to beat a deeply flawed Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was possible because we rely on the anachronistic Electoral College rather than popular vote which makes the votes of people in some 11 to 12 states more important that the rest. Even so, the American people will be unlikely to reelect Mr. Trump without the GOP's mix of voter suppression and intimidation, gas lighting, racism and lies as well as financial and other support from foreign governments. Would Mr. Stephens care to speculate on what happens if Mr. Trump gets reelected due to something like Florida's disputed election in 2000 which gave GW Bush an electoral victory over Al Gore? Would the republic, as currently realized under the Constitution, endure yet more proof that our representative democracy is neither representative nor democratic? Will the majority of US citizens be willing to allow Trump another four years of corruption, incompetence, and immorality without a challenge that goes beyond conventional politics?
1
the problem is not capitalism, or success. The problem is a rigged system that robs many of opportunity.
2
I find the Republican embrace of "socialist" as an epithet to use against Democrats laughable. I live near and work in San Francisco, arguably the most liberal place in the country. It is also perhaps the most entrepreneurial, capitalistic boomtown in the country. And I have yet to find any "conservative" who will answer the question of how profit-motive benefits the consumer of health insurance. A mix of public and private enterprise is simply the most logical way to approach many of the problems facing our nation.
4
A great assessment of Capitalism, the worst system that seems to work the best for the most. If the left wing of the Democratic Party does not wake up they will be looking at 4 more years of Donald Trump (ala Nixon v McGovern)
1
I appreciate what Mr. Stevens is trying to say, but I think a salient point that is missing is that we are already a socialist country: we have Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, unemployment insurance, food stamps, the list goes on. Even Trump’s relief package for farmers, which ran into the billions, after his tariffs is textbook socialism. I think the problem is a Cold War hangover; for so long the country was admonished about the evils of the “socialist” Soviet Union. We don’t have a dichotomy between Ayn Rand and Lenin.
The first socialist programs in modern history came from Bismarck in the German Empire. He was hardly a leftist agitator. He realized that the only way to neutralize the anti-monarchist Socialists was to basically co-opt their economic ideas: health care for all workers, old age and accident insurance. He understood that the way to stabilize a country is to take away the uncertainty of the poor and middle class. And this was in the 1880s.
My point is that new social programs are not diametrically opposed to an open economy. Universal health care, education, child care, employment. Capitalists should welcome these things. They make people more productive, and they make the country more stable. They take away the uncertainty in the lives of workers. It’s not handouts; it’s investment.
I’m not saying Mr. Stevens made a bad faith argument, not at all, but I do disagree with some of the fundamental assumptions of his premise.
I do enjoy your columns Bret
4
There is no socialism in communism as they export all their elderly and sick to our nations to use our Welfare States.(Look up health tourism and birth tourism)
The most capitalist nations around are China and USA and both have the highest numbers of BILLIONIARES in the world. USA under the Republicans is very much like China and Russia, where government employees, especially those who work for the military are rewarded with socialism and pensions etc and life long travel, and the rest of the population are left behind. The irony in the Republican policies is that they don't practise what they preach about evil socialism, as all the politicians and anyone who works in military gets rewarded handsomely with socialist government perks for life, when they retire or get sick.
1
Bret, give us the word that describes your "reformed" capitalism and please describe its programs to keep all Americans healthy, receiving a strong education and having appropriate shelter.
3
Most faux-profits produced today only by dumping massive levels of ‘negative externality costs’ on our country, our world, our environment, our children, and ‘others’ will only be discovered over time, as has been discovered and disinvested from in the sobering case of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund selling-off North Sea fossil fuels false-profitabilities
As Bernie would say — “this is yuuuuuge”
Like “Our Children’s Trust, this is the first and most notable disinvestment based on the truth that there should be NO INVESTMENTS that CAUSE ‘negative externality costs’ to be dumped on our world just for the criminal intent of making ‘faux-profits’ only through raping ‘our world’.
I have spent many years trying to wake the ‘socially responsible investment community’ to the reality that they could make a massive and POSITIVE EFFECT on “our country” and the world if they stopped using their current ‘factors and screening’ approach to selecting good companies, and avoiding bad companies, by switching to the simple idea, marketing strategy, and ‘marketing narrative’ of investing in “POSITIVE EXTERNALITY PROFITS” and avoiding like the PLAGUE any investments in deceitful corporations that are only able to make ‘phony profits’ by destroying our only world.
1
++ sigh ++
Current generation "socialists" do not reject capitalism.
We reject the current generation of capitalists rejection of the social contract.
It -does- take a village!
3
Eloquently said.
Capitalism has failed the masses, Bret. And you are not one of the “mass” - you’re a moderately wealthy elite that doesn’t have to worry about the inherent anxiety that comes with living from paycheck to paycheck whilst working two demeaning jobs.
I have two degrees and i’ve worked my entire life since i was 16. I’m 40 now, with no savings and no hope of ever having one. The sort of capitalism practiced in the US is a stranglehold that chokes the economic life out of every person that isn’t already positioned closer to the top. It does not create opportunities or reward creativity: it rewards theft, abuse, subjugation, and it uses people up until they’re broke and dead. This is the endgame of our glorious capitalist society. People like you, Bret, won’t be happy until people like me are essentially indentured slaves to corporate masters.
Your ideas are old and outdated, and your column betrays the “running from the obvious future” attitude that all old white conservatives share. Your time is done and your support of the status quo places you squarely in the group of modern thinkers who can no longer contribute anything of use. The rest of us want to dismantle what is an imbalanced, hurtful system of economic imprisonment and move towards something better. We don’t need you anymore.
3
The Democrats aren't anti capitalism but they are anti its abuses and the vast inequality it's producing. Stephens and his fellow Republicans would do well to remember J. M. Keynes' warning back in the 30's. "If the new problem (gross inequality) is not solved the existing order of society will become so discredited that wild, foolish and destructive changes will become inevitable."
1
The rabid form of zero sum capitalism we have in the USA is about winners vs losers, not about how we can make our society better, and is creating massive social inequality. Furthermore the rabid consumerism and consumption associated with capitalism will be the death of the planet....
1
I am a democratic moderate, and am planning to donate heavily to Biden.
Not because I think he is the Second Coming, but because I think Warren, Sanders and the far left of the party are clueless about how to win the election in the Midwestern swing states. They will become punching bags for Trump.
Yes, our far left progressives will win CA and NY in a landslide. But they will be butchered in places like PA (where I grew up), MI, OH, WI and elsewhere. We don't need a sequel to 2016.
If we lose this election, we may well lose our democracy to a treasonous psychopath. Biden will beat Trump, I suspect no one else on our side will.
Biden/Harris 2020.
1
You're darned right "the most successful economic system shouldn't be a dirty word," Bret!
So, just as soon as ACCOUNTABILITY is correctly held ACCOUNTABLE insofar as the very "private property" -- upon whose black backs America was built -- whence our nation's founding IPO spurred both the very physical and monetary investment from France for which our Liberty Bell-curve's cant had irreversibly zero-summed the dumb end of RETURNS unto said "private property," capitalism's level playing field can finally incentivize REAL equal opportunity.
Until then, without even reasonably mentioning due Reparations, Bret's the "v[ulga]rian who still wants his [MAGA fake and cheat it too] to have it both ways."
" . . . a mess of congressional investigations that will quickly confuse and bore the public (check)"
Oh, really? Let's test that in 6 months, Bret.
3
I grow tired of the conservative writers at the NYT. Over the last few weeks, I have read articles by Bret Stephens, David Brooks, and Ross Douthat on issues as varied as the Catholic church, abortion, health care, the American electorate, and now capitalism and socialism. Somehow their world views are totally different than mine. Rather than trying to deal with the big picture and the unbelieveable discrepancies from public norms which we are presently experiencing, they are busy obfuscating with narrow-minded moralism, semantics, and outright pedantry. If this is the best that they have to offer then they like the people they represent (the GOP) are truly a dying breed. God spare us!
2
I would like to see you and Mr. Cohen debate the issue.
You use the word “mislabeled” but don’t expand on its meaning in the current debate. Our economic system is properly labeled “social capitalism.” The failure of Democrats or Republicans to label it as such and define properly what it means is a disservice to all of us. I will be interested in whether or not candidates from the Democratic Party will be hounded by this “hickenlooper” — the "biggest name" in poor job of explaining what it most obvious.
The author ignores the worst thing about Capitalism. It’s Capitalists. These are people making decisions, not a system or philosophy.
Now as the Republicans try to increase capitalists’ freedom, we increasingly see them making decisions that threaten our safety. They are fracking, sending our oil overseas, and wrecking the atmosphere.
How in hell’s name can Mr. Stevens claim that we have a free market when the oil and plastics industries do not have to include the hidden costs to our atmosphere and oceans due solely to their products? Where is the pollution price in a gallon of gas?
Capitalism is being propped up by the Republicans obstruction. Mr. Stevens, you need to rethink your analysis. You mention the crux: when European leaders emerged from WWII and Nazism, they took steps to protect social cohesion with government policy. They did this to ensure safety. USA is in a similar situation. We must ensure social cohesion and societal safety with proven government policies to combat the pollution emissions our society is creating.
With your head in the guillotine you are arguing Philosophy. Get with it, Man!
I feel that Andrew Yang, a successful entrepreneur, is clearly addressing the ways in which capitalism is failing a growing number of Americans. He also has carefully considered ideas on how to rectify this. I highly recommend listening to him on the Freakonomics or Joe Rogan Experience podcasts and checking out his website.
Yang2020.com
The real issue is not capitalism, it is Libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that has grown dramatically since Reagan and the ascendancy of “greed is good”.
When there are no social or legal constraints on capitalism, when deregulation is the norm, we wind up too far to the right, too obsessed with glorifying acquisition.
That, unsurprisingly, provokes a counter reaction, which we are witnessing.
Those who claim to be centrists are, by and large, simply apologists for the current situation.
"Wealth, innovation, and charity" What a perfect, and perhaps inadvertent, summation of the selfishness of the right. A government providing for the basic needs of its citizens should not depend upon whether the super rich dane to scatter a little charity, only to their favored and often prejudicial causes, of course. We do indeed have a Biblical economic system, as the extreme right wing and evangelicals would say. It is called, however, "crumbs from the rich man's table."
1
Great reply! But it's "deign." Perhaps you were thinking of Denmark. According to a recent study, social-democratic Denmark is the happiest nation on earth.
Capitalism isn't a dirty word...but unfettered greed is (it's two words though)...and as the writer posits, capitalism ought to be reformed to be more equitable. Changing the unfair tax system perhaps...there many ways to do that.
There is -and will continue- to be an upheaval in our manufacturing, service and technological industries...blue collar jobs (essentially the MAGA wearing population) will be extinct very soon....replaced by better performing robots and AI. The same for service industries where tellers are replaced by ATMs and online banking, etc...we all know that it's a matter of time, perhaps months rather than years that our employment models will have been completely eradicated as we know them.
Another tangential example of where we are heading is WeWork. A corporation that provides shared workspaces, technology startup subculture communities, and services for entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups, small businesses etc. That's the future of employment.
3
It strikes me that those words - capitalism and socialism - hold such sway on the American right that you might just as well substitute good and evil. For them, capitalism embodies not just economics, but personal rights, religious freedom and more. In other words, it's not just about how they make a living but how they live.
Sure capitalism can (and should) have non-capitalist components (like national defense, medicare and medicaid, and even those nasty socialist interstate highways) but Mr. Stephens is right - you have to first support capitalism as the preferred system or risk having the doors of large swaths of the electorate slammed in your face.
2
Mr Stephens and other conservatives would do well to reflect upon the circumstances upon which this socialism business got its popularity. The financial crisis laid bare a political economy which selected for and rewarded behavior that sought short term gain and mass bulk investing in tools that in the end were of no value. After all of our financial institutions, which hold the wealth of our nation, were over leveraged and the bottom dropped out, they came hat in hand to the "socialist" president who promptly bailed them out with taxpayer money and engineered a stable way forward. A lot of people were hurt by the behavior of these institutions, who let the country down and in my opinion threatened the very foundations of what we call private property. Capitalism as practiced by institutions today has a very unstable, house of cards, emperor has no clothes feel. Conservatives have yet to answer this charge succinctly. They point to socialists, immigrants, Obama, Hillary emails, Fannie and Freddie (not without merit), everyone but themselves as the source of the problems we suffered in the years after the Bush administration. Rather than bemoan the lefts behavior, conservatives would do better to understand what it is about capitalism and the traits that it selects for that while the engine of economic growth also can be in conflict with the public good. A more thorough reckoning is needed, and unfortunately the conservative movement does not appear to be up to the task.
3
George W Bush was a socialist? Me thinks not. The bailout started under his administration. As much as I hate what that administration did to my beloved country, give credit where it’s due.
Sure capitalism made America great as Mr. Stephens is at pains to emphasis but he only gives a passing nod to the distinction between the unrestrained and the regulated versions.
In fact what we have is 'run away' capitalism, a version in which just about anything goes. It has cost us dearly and this is only the beginning.
What we need and what I hope the younger members of the Democratic party and their supporters can foster, is a whole new idea of capitalism. The most successful economic system doesn't need to be a dirty word, as the author points out, but it will always be tarnished in its present form because greed is a corrupting force that overwhelms all moral sense and will eventually destroy the system.
This may be why Hickenlooper hesitates before calling himself 'a proud capitalist'. But if one believes that capitalism as it exists now is the best we can do, then yes, let's all be proud of it and the devil may care.
5
Why didn't he just say he's proud of what he achieved and the jobs he created in the business world and that he's a Social Democrat, but not a Democratic Socialist? There's a big difference between the two, and it's name is the arm-waving, ranting Bernie Sanders, who has done more damage to the nation (by hurting Hillary's campaign) and the Democratic cause than any other single person. (Well, regarding the nation, with one definite exception, the fellow with the DTs in the oval office, and maybe Comey, too.)
2
I think Brett is correct about the risks for democrats but it's a problem of semantics and misclassification than ideology per se.
Capitalism isn't a system of government. It's an extreme archetype along a continuum of ways to approach economic activity. No one would (should) want to live in a purely capitalist economy, and Adam Smithwould agree.
Politicians are not capitalists, or shouldn't be, they are politicians and should be focused on the polity in what is (in the US) a republic representative form of government. The economy is but one important piece in a much larger enterprise, operating as a nation animated by rule of law, individual rights and social bonds that create cohesiveness. Politicians ought to have views about what the right mix of tools and approaches are to achieve "a good and just society".
markets are a useful tool for economic efficiency but they have no inherent moral purpose. They work well for good or ill, and when left to their own devices in an extreme form, lead to monopoly, oligopoly and unhealthy concentration of power that is inimacable to a Republican form of government or a just society.
We talk in polarities and extremes but the obvious truth is markets need to serve the society, not the other way around. Politicians, need to serve the interests of the republic, not merely the "market."
I just wish we could agree on what a republic does as the starting point for discussions of politics and political economy. Might help!
4
Yes. Beautifully said.
Yes, American capitalism brought us all the check marks you cite. But reading across from the OpEd page to the Editorial page, we have a clear demonstration of the uniqueness of American capitalism: a bought and paid for Mitch McConnell, self-proclaimed Supreme Leader of what legislation will be passed, bought and paid for by the excesses and abuses of American capitalism, with no Constitutional check to constrain him from allowing the continued showering of the REAL beneficiaries of American capitalism - corporations and the 0.01% - at the expense of the rest of us.
2
@B.R.
That is not "American Capitalism" that is Colonialism or Communism. Both are corrupt systems that exploit the masses and profit a select few.
American capitalism is what we had before reagan.
I don’t know Hickenlooper’s background, although I’m aware he was once a geologist. Fact is, he sounds like an academic—that is, he talks like he’s talking to academics. His fellow candidate Warren, in contrast, seems to be able to talk to a larger crowd—and perhaps walk her dog and chew gum at the same time.
49
@rjon Whoa. Are you and I speaking of the same E. Warren? Is that the same person who made a TV ad where she says, "Wait, I'm going to get ME a beer"?
That one ad was more revealing than a thousand ads and has labelled Warren as an elitist elite for now and forever.
5
There’s nothing quite like a man of conviction.
“Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him and behind him.” -Nietzsche
Capitalism shouldn't be a dirty word and rampant uncontrolled greed by those who practice it shouldn't take place in a capitalist system. Tightly regulated capitalism, much more regulated than what we have now, should be workable. A combination of some form regulated capitalism and democratic socialism is the fairest system. The problem here in the good old U.S.A. and elsewhere in some parts of the world is pure unadulterated selfishness.
More biased drivel. If the free market is so great, why do the rich and powerful always run to Congress for laws to protect their little niche from competition and fair taxes? If Capitalism is our choice, then why should individuals who have done zero work (children of the rich) inherit massive fortunes? If capitalism is so great, why do we not invest most heavily in the most valuable capital-people? If the free market is best, why cannot our politicians negotiate lower drug prices on behalf of our people? If free flow of information and transparency are important, why can the rich hide their money outside of America with zero accountability? If capitalism is the best, why do large corporations get rescued at tax payer expense? Why are big banks allowed to get the reward and pass risk on to taxpayers? You see, what we have in America is a socialist financial system, walking around in a capitalist disguise. Only the little people pay taxes.
1
Both “Capitalism” and “Socialism” have become pejoratives. Neither in its absolute form is sustainable without a moderating force. Capitalism requires a dollop of “ethics,” and Socialism a dollop of pragmatism.
If we still had ethics and statesmanship in DC, we would look to successful European models, but unfortunately we don’t.
Instead Republicans rail in support of their 5%, and Dems seem ready to burn down the house. It seems that politics and common sense are incompatible.
Democrats, Please don’t get pushed to the left by your young firebrands. They not only lack historical perspective, more importantly their goals are far too extreme for most Americans.
I have no advice for Republicans. They and their Party are beyond redemption!
1
Someone needs to ask Trump if he owns shares in private insurance companies and is that the reason why he is bias towards having a Welfare State. There should be a law that says all politicans have to declare all their income and shares held - either by him or in trust for his family.
Capitalism needs a serious makeover if it’s supposed to work for the majority of people and thus remain compatible with Democracy. Maybe that’s why the China is so good at it, because of its strictly autoritarian one party government rule.
Is that what we would like to become just to keep capitalism competitve and alive?
1
Bret, Denmark is not socialist, but Sanders, the man who wants to make America like Denmark, is a socialist? Using your definitions, of course.
I’m afraid you will have to clarify that.
4
Mr Stephens is a man who understands language, the meaning of words and the power of such. So he should understand full well that it is not the ideology behind these two words 'capitalism' and 'socialism' that is driving this recent narrative that fills the pages of the Times, WSJ and the airwaves of Faux and CNN. Rather its the IDEA of what people bring to each of these words. Republicans for years ( thank you Lee Atwater ) have been able to coop language as a weapon. Thus 'welfare' becomes attached to programs like medicare and social security - which happen to be socialistic programs to a degree. Corporate tax breaks bestowed by only one party upon corporations is indeed corporate 'welfare' - but its been denied and tuned into 'trickle down'. Of course we all know it only trickles up. The discussion can go on and on, but the bottom line is that somehow the Republicans and the noise machine ( with some circular firing squad help from dems) has managed to turn the conversation into one about taking everything away from hard workers and dividing it among masses of lazy people who eat bonbons.
Brett knows better - and Hickenlooper refused to fall into the linguistic trap.
2
Stephens searches out a position espoused by some Democrats to attack the party and its chances in the 2020 election. Does he really think that the Democrat who will run against Trump will run against capitalism? Stephens knows this is not true. And when evaluating the wonders of our capitalistic system Stephens conveniently overlooks what he would call "socialistic" programs have added to all of the success he trumpets. How about the New Deal programs like Social Security, Medicare, the FDIC, FNMA, NLRB and the SEC? What Americans are content about is not just capitalism's ability to generate the maximum amount of wealth. It also includes all of the controls, regulations, laws and government oversight that allows capitalism to work for all the people, not just the few.
But Stephens creates the tired straw dog argument conservatives always use to attack Democrats. Find an outlier position from some Democrat, find the most extreme positions and their proponents in the party and paint them as representing the party's official position. This is how Fox "news" makes most of its partisan arguments.
As hard as I tried I could find little in Stephen's piece in which he admits the failings of capitalism. But the American people have often agreed to fix it. We created a graduated income tax, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, a food stamps program, etc. There is nothing sacrosanct about capitalism. It can be modified and improved to suit today's needs.
2
It's amazing to me how these so called "progressives" are so obsessed with trying to recycle the failures of the past. Capitalism isn't perfect, but by and large the failures of today are more about a failure to protect and balance competition than too much competition. Consumers and workers, by and large, have few choices because we've failed to regulate monopolies, let unions be undermined, allowed for forced arbitration, among many other things. That has let companies gain monopolies on industries, regional markets, and the labor market, which is antithesis of a healthy free market.
We need to restore worker and consumer protections, foster more competition, and steward the environment. None of those things requires socialism.
3
If your premise was true, we wouldn’t have Trump. Americans want change, but according to you, let’s just carry on...Healthcare will eat our GDP alive, climate change looms, college debt is a drag on the economy and low wages don’t make sense for an economy based on consumption. We can grapple with these problems or die off. And, don’t worry about the Dems, we did just fine in the last election - focus on your party or what’s left of it, as unbridled capitalism has made it “The Sopranos”.
2
"To smooth the edges of capitalism, even to save it from itself, doesn’t mean to disdain and disavow it.
There’s a difference between taming a horse and shooting it."----- We have let the capitalists become so politically powerful that it is impossible to reign in...i.e. the horse is too sick to tame. Health care and big pharma are the perfect example.
3
Anyone in the USA who has shares in private insurance companies is going to see a government paid for welfare state as a threat to their share market prices and is going to go on a hatchet job to devalue ethical and moral policies that improve the lives and welfare of your fellow citizens. Only way to get around this is to spell it out to them by saying you'd implement a policy similar to Australia where some of it involves private insurance companies and some doesn't.
People aren't going to vote for anything that is going to affect their pockets and put less money into it.
3
The 'goodness' of system is not defined by the success of few individuals, but rather of living conditions of masses. If there are millions who could not make a living wages even in the time of economic boom, it is not a wonderful system. If you need to work 80-90 hours per week, forgetting your family and your other interests, it is not a wonderful system, because it is not sustainable and it is not realistic. The human beings are much more than just industrial machines that could work day in and day out without stop. And capitalism failed to recognise that. It is dehumanize the humans, as matter of fact it is prefers machines, and tolerates the humans just because there is no machine that could fully replace humans. Once such machines will be produced, capitalism will dispose the humans, they will be no value for capitalists.
"To prevail, a moderate Democrat will need to behave likewise. The message can go like this: Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone."
Does Mr. Stephens admit that current capitalism does not work for everyone? if so, why then he wants Hickenlooper to say I am a proud capitalist?
Mr. Stephens should not be asking that Democrats should say how proud they are of capitalism. He should be proposing solutions on how to reform capitalism with a dose of socialism so it can work for everybody, not just wall street where Mr. Stephens worked.
2
Nation at peace? Afghanistan and Syria Wage growth? I'd have to ask in what sectors because in the last job I had, I received a mere $.50 raise in almost two years. Congressional investigations that confuse and bore the public? Bret seems to think that "the public" consists mostly of Trump supporters who would certainly be confused and bored, not to mentioned angered by such investigations. As usual more disingenuous cheering for Trump and democrat bashing.
2
Bret, you invest entirely too much energy into labels and not enough into the salient details behind them.
The GOP and its corporate backers oppose all regulation, whether it's the CFPB or the EPA. These are precisely the regulations that would "tame" capitalism to prevent it from destroying people's lives. When they say "Capitalism", they mean unfettered by "job-killing regulation". They prefer people-killing malfeasance.
When used in the U.S., the word "socialism" really means "social democracy", i.e., capitalism limited by regulation to ensure ethical social behavior. This is the goal many progressives support. It includes removing from markets those services (education, health care) in which the profit motive works against socially ethical behavior.
2
Capitalism isn't the problem. "Citizens United" and K Street is the problem.
310
@JAB True, except citizens united was not an accident but rather a logical consequence of a capitalism increasingly allowed to go rampant according to its own philosophy and rules. Capitalism left to its own devices does not work and will ultimately destroy its own societal underpinnings.
38
@JAB
Dogs are generally not a problem if kept on a short leash by an experienced handler. It might work for capitalism as well, but we'll never know until we succeed in getting these predator-wannabees on a short leash as well.
CAPITALISM isn't necessarily a problem.
CAPITALISTS frequently are, and periodically require neutering.
31
@JAB
Nonesense. Politicians are the problem. Cuomo, a vocal critic of President Trump, blamed congressional Republicans for passing tax reforms that reduced the state and local tax deduction Americans can take on their annual income tax forms -- meaning residents of high-tax blue states like New York have been feeling the pinch, sparking their exodus.
“This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich,” Cuomo said last month. “We did. Now, God forbid, the rich leave.” Policy matters my friends. Identity politics needs to end. The Robin-hood approach and socialism does not work anywhere but the movies
5
Consistently reading Bret’s column and seeing him on various MSNBC news programs I conclude that his thought framework of reasoned analysis using facts recognizing differences is the direction we need to adopt.
It is dangerous that the Democratic Party and its crop of candidates are pandering to the left just as the republicans did with the Tea party.
And yes - I am a democrat and a capitalist who believes the latter needs to be tempered by government but not dismembered by the left.
1
Brett has said 2020 isn’t going to be referendum on Trump, but a choice. Maybe for about 55% of the voters. The others are glued to Fox & Friends, phony YouTube videos, Limbaugh, Hannity, and “Bible” Radio. They believe in alternative facts. They see Trump as Messiah dividing the waters separating them from nirvana. They’re goin’ where he’s goin’. [Sorry, where HE’s goin’.]
With 45% already locked up and beyond any kind of counter argument, it’s going to be tough. Especially when the sane 55%, the ones that actually believe their own eyes, mostly live in just a few districts.
2
@John ✔️✔️ Brews Maybe you ought to be listening and learning from the 45% who are spread out across the nation and helped elect Trump the first time around. What was it about Obama's promises and resulting policies that voters ultimately rejected? Why did Hillary lose, and what can be learned from her loss in crafting the next batch of liberal candidates? Don't buy the media spin that Trump voters are uneducated and meth users, bearing children out of wedlock we cannot support and hating on the non-whites. You buy that, you've already lost.
spot on in this column, Bret with one "t"...
Preach! (it) !
1
A simple solution for Democrats: They should start referring to themselves as "Social Capitalists of America."
Or anyone of the variants of those 2 words, as the MSM does now with socialism.
Social Capitalism
Capital Democrats
Democratic Capitalism
Problem solved
The so-called ‘progressive’ faction formerly known as the Democratic Party won’t be getting my vote next time around. And likely millions of disillusioned adult Democrats just like me will follow suit.
You can thank Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib for that.
1
And with this column Mr. Stephens officially assumes the mantle of being Bill Safire's replacement. (Note: he doesn't have to commence writing an 'On Language' column.)
@Clancy Oh, I'm encouraging, but Mr. Stephens seems just now to be cluing in on who the Trump voters are and what we value. He is a Never Trumper himself, and he has got very far to go before one can say he understands this nation that he was not really raised in, and which he is still trying to grasp.
It's a good start though, understanding what the Democrats are doing wrong and how today's mainstream media is enabling them.
We don't actually have capitalism. The last thing a company on top wants is competition. And if you are big enough and powerful enough , you just get the rules changed to help stiffle competition. In most industries, the "free market" is a fantasy. Even adam smith positied that capitalism had no place in the health care or education market. It didn't take long after the advent of a national economy (e.g. late 19th century) for the evils of unbridled capitalism to become woefully apparent. Resulting in antitrust laws, labor protection laws, etc. Unfortunately, both antitrust laws and labor laws have not kept up with the technology revolution, and even enforcement of the laws we have has languished, aided by bought and paid for politicians. Sensible regulation of capitalism ended 40 years ago. Bring it back
2
Okay, for brain tease: is productivity and efficiency the only values of a capitalist society?
Are there humans in this equation?
Is Brett Stephens a real person or is he the productivity and efficiency of a very narrow education and experience?
Capitalism is one end of the spectrum.
A mixed economy is what is real in most ‘capitalist’ nations.
As long as you continue to count the financial/evangelical opinions of the courtiers of power, Mr. Stephens, this paper reveals itself as propaganda outlet.
Don’t want that do we?
1
"To the extent that Sanders’s concept of democratic socialism has gained traction, it’s not because capitalism has failed the masses. It’s because Sanders, beyond any of his peers, has consistent convictions and an authentic persona."
Oh boy. It’s the good old “capitalism hasn’t failed, everyone has iPhones!“ argument. The two problems with this are:
- The rising tide has lifted all boats somewhat, but the billionaires yachts are sitting on mountaintops. This is called massive income and wealth inequality, Bret. It’s the highest since the Gilded Age. When capital enjoys so many advantages over labor, the system is broken.
- Having a lot of cheap foreign-made goods is small comfort when you lose your job, or have a health emergency. That’s why we need “socialism“ – a system designed to help the people, not the healthcare industry.
1
"The great merit of the capitalist system, it has been said, is that it succeeds in using the nastiest motives of nasty people for the ultimate benefit of society." (Falsely attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but actually by his colleague E.A.G. Robinson.)
1
Other commentors have written about the government programs like Social Security Medicare Medicaid K-12 education interstate highway system police fire etc.
I will not repeat their excellent arguments.
Let cite several examples where government stepped in when private enterprise would not.
Before FDR's REA many rural areas did not have electricity because it was not profitable to serve these areas.
Suppose there were no USPS. Would UPS and FEX EX serve remote areas and if so at what cost.
In the mid 1950's when the Salk polio vaccine was determined to be effective the evil FEDERAL GOVERNMENT [sorry moderator for using these obscene words] instituted a program of free Salk injections for school children.
{I was one who received the 3 Salk injections}
Conservatives were horrified.
This was SOCIALIZED medicine thru the back door.
Would private enterprise have done this program or would they have gouged like Shrekli did or how the manufacturers of Epi Pen are now doing.
Conservatives do not like certain programs because they eliminate the conservatives profits. The conservatives' taxes are increased to pay for these programs and they do not want to pay these higher taxes.
But they can't say that and make their greed apparent so they cry "socialism" or "communism".
Everyone "knows" socialism and communism are really the same and communism is associated with the evil USSR.
Will this bogus tactic continue to work.
Trump's base is holding at 40% and 90% of GOP still support Trump
2
The Democratic party can afford to lose the voters who fly on planes, drive nonelectric cars, eat beef, use natural gas to heat, care about border security, believe in energy independence, believe in jobs, think Israel is our ally in the Middle East, or like me, who are scientists who get scientific results from data rather than from consensuses.
Other than that, they are doing fine.
2
Capitalism good. Socialism bad.
That's the depth of Mr. Stephen's analysis. Republicans are masters at "Keep it Simple Stupid" even when reality is a bit more complicated.
Here's a few questions. If we're living in a free market heaven, why do we privatize profit and socialize loss? (see bank bailout). If the predatory, trickle down capitalism practiced in the USA since Ronald Reagan is such a winner -- why the burgeoning gap between the haves and have nots? Why aren't more boats being lifted? Why is the middle class shrinking?
Define "oligarchy" and then write a column to convince me that we aren't living in one.
2
This is really bizarre, as if you have no idea what life is like for the millions and millions of people our here day after day. In brief, your description is bizarre. I have no idea how as a country we overcome this.
1
Stephens lives in a fantasy world. For starters we don NOT have the most successful economic system in the world. That distinction arguably belongs to Norway. And guess what? Their system happens to be a socialist democracy. Indeed, most Scandinavian countries have a similar form of government with thriving economies who report the highest "happiness" indexes in the world. Corporate America today is a national disgrace and is appropriately represented by El Trumpo.
5
Yesterday I watched the candidacy of John Hickenlooper trickle away in less than a minute. Democrats need to get their heads on straight about how to handle questions that seek to hang simplistic labels around their necks. Lofty ideals are great, but the battle for the presidency will be won in the trenches.
The need is not hard to understand, and it’s not to win popularity contests among your faithful. It is to win the electoral college. It’s there for the taking. Who will have broad enough appeal to do it?
76
@Fred - Hickenlooper should simply have said he doesn't believe in unfettered capitalism and asked whether Scarborough felt the same.
19
What Bret Stephens fails to notice is that John Hickenlooper's capitalism is no longer the dominant model. It is not that hard working, self-sacrificing businessman don't exist but rather much of what the Justice Democrats and liberals are railing against is a form of capitalism that transcends borders and regulation, plays country against country, monopolizes the market through acquisition thereby eliminating any true free market. I think it is more correctly called Monopolistic Corporatism. Unbounded size is one of it's striking characteristics just like the big international banks that support it.
This is one of the drivers of the Brexit movement and the New Green Deal in this country. Our current president is a servant of Monopolistic Corporatism. It isn't clear that many old-school democrats see it this way but the new generation sees it as the big struggle for working people in the twenty-first century.
9
Great comment. Stephens is predictably simplistic and naive. Just as those on the right intentionally mischaracterize democratic socialism as communism, those on the left try to paint capitalism as fascism, as if communism and fascism were the only two alternatives. Both pure capitalism and pure socialism are terrible systems, if the ultimate goal is to balance the general welfare of society with the individual instinct toward self interest. I would say right now self interest is winning at the expense of the general welfare in this country and in many others with “capitalist” systems, so its probably time to make some adjustments.
1
When Donald Trump, Starbuck's Howard Schultz and I grew up in NYC, public college was free through CCNY. No one ever called it socialism. When AIG took the bailout from the Federal Government in 2009, no one called it socialism. Of course Hank Greenberg, it's former CEO, called the 11% interest rate charged for the bailout usury. I think we would all appreciate a top interest rate of 11% on our credit cards. And how about those Pay Day Loan Companies charging the poor up to 400% interest per year? Throwing around simplistic labels such as Socialism versus Capitalism won't address the issues affecting our fellow citizens such as college loans, home ownership, etc.
7
Ugh. No serious Democrat is proposing socialism and B. Stephens knows it. Socialism is where the state owns the means of production and pretty much everything else. It puts a ceiling on everything. Democratic Socialism establishes a floor. It assumes that certain aspects of life - the essentials, like health, education, housing - should not be profit centers...or at least there should be decent public options for those things (e.g., universal single-payer healthcare for all...and then if you want a platinum policy no one's stopping you from buying that).
It further assumes that providing those to those who need them is actually GOOD for a capitalist economy. Take the worry out of providing the life-or-death stuff for your family and unleash the creative potential of millions of unworried people.
The details are certainly up for discussion. But in the meantime, please acknowledge that promoting decent public healthcare and education doesn't mean pushing the idea that government should also take over the bicycle and shoe factories.
5
I am developing the impression that there are powerful forces at work intentionally confusing and conflating the terms and meanings of Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy. Democratic Socialism is when the government owns the means of production and it relates to economic policy alongside a political democracy. It does not have a market economy (capitalism). A Social Democracy has a capitalist economy with a social safety net so that all citizens have an equal opportunity to advance and participate in an economy according to merit. It operates alongside a political democracy. Norway is a Social Democracy and has a capitalist economy purer than the USA’s where our government subsidizes certain industries (this is a form of socialism everyone here seems comfortable with). We currently have a mixed economy in the USA, not pure capitalism. My husband is a Norwegian citizen, I live in Norway portions of the year. I know what I’m talking about from first-hand experience. There are people here benefitting from conflating a Social Democracy with Democratic Socialism to scare the public into voting against their interests. This does not benefit the middle class or the poor. It would benefit the average American to educate themselves about the facts of other economic/political systems and stop relying on the uninformed and informed people who use the public’s ignorance to further their own greedy interests to the detriment of the poor and middle class.
3
@Somebody With A Conscience
You are so right. There is a big distinction to be made between Democratic Socialist and Social Democrat, but even some of the candidates are using the wrong terminology. I don't hear any of them saying that the State should own the means of production, which is the main theme of Democratic Socialism. In my view, they are all Social Democrats who just want all elements of society to have a fair shake in the economic system.
1
I have left the Democratic party for reasons you cite. I am not interested in labels nor sweeping generalizations, nor creating new bogeymen to politicize. I will exercise my right to vote, with the hopes that the current two party system does not end up like a D,C. version of "Dumb and Dumber."
49
@Mark - Scarborough was making the sweeping generalization and trying to label Hickenlooper and make is position a bogeyman. Scarborough is a Republican.
8
If capitalism is such wonderful system, why the socialist ideas get traction here in the US? Why capitalism became a dirty word? Maybe, because even during economic boom and time of low unemployment, millions work for wages that could not support living expenses? Maybe because the wonderful salary increase actually still could not keep up with increase of living cost, forcing people to use charities and social(!!!) services to survive in the era of capitalistic prosperity. Of course, according to the author, it is not why the capitalism is the dirty word, it is all because of winning personality of Bernie. Never mind that there are countries in the world where Bernie's ideas are implemented long before Bernie phenomenon. And these countries are doing well. As matter of fact, they are inspiration for Bernie's ideas. Of course, we should not call these country socialist, because otherwise, it will look like capitalism is not a best system. So the author uses this amazing mental gymnastic, when he labeled the Bernie's ideas as socialist one, while insisting that countries who implemented these ideas are not socialist one.
My father had a saying: there's a place for everything, and everything in its place. Extreme corporate capitalism, what we have now, must be regulated so that small businesses can thrive and give hope to the American dream. But social programs must also be in place so that hope can grow: affordable healthcare and reality-based education without crippling debt, action on climate change, reliable infrastructure, etc.
There's a place between the "isms" where the majority of Americans live; I and many like me are looking for the candidate who embraces that place, has realistic plans to get us there and can craft a clear message to convey those plans. As I see it, Democrats have more of the right ideas but have previously failed miserably at messaging. We cannot afford another similar failure.
2
This column is just like the one Mr. Stephens wrote a few days ago about Antisemitism in the Democratic Party. In both cases, much ado about nothing.
Today, the Democratic Party is more diverse, and percolating with more ideas, than either of our major political parties during my lifetime. People who call themselves Democrats hail from a wide range of ideological viewpoints. The diversity is a healthy, even a wonderful event in the evolution of American democracy.
Look deep in the Democratic Party and you'll find rock-solid support for Israel - though not for it's far right-wing government - and rock solid support for capitalism and risk-taking.
With regards to Israel and economics, but especially Israel, Mr. Stephens is brittle. He tends to faint at any hint of unorthodoxy. But as a famous Jew and capitalist once said, "Get out of the road if you can't lend a hand."
The laissez-faire, greed-is-good, capitalism that exists today in the United States will disappear with the coming catastrophe of climate change. Things that are bad today will get worse, and the monopolists and oligarchs will take the spoils.
We are planning our own destruction, and capitalism is certainly not helping.
1
The current discussion of capitalism vs. socialism as it is being frame by the Republicans is a false comparison.
The word "capitalism" is being used in the standard sense of market economy and private ownership.
But the use of the word "socialism" as it is being referred to by folks like Sanders, as it is used in the context of social-democratic countries like Germany, Canada, and Denmark, does not refer to an economic system of the government ownership of the means of production, but rather a strong welfare state that exists side by side with a market economy. It is a system in which the tax system is used to fund a social safety net and basic services for everyone in terms of health and child care among other things.
But, it is precisely as a "government takeover on a path to dictatorship" that Republicans want the word "socialism" to invoke, a system that is simply a precursor to Communism and totalitarian systems like the former USSR.
The better questions than "Are you a proud capitalist?" would be, "Are you proud of the the style of capitalism that we currently have in this country? And if not what do you see as the problems in the current version of capitalism?" "Do you believe that a healthy market system in a wealthy democratic society needs reasonable regulations and a redistributive tax system that provides a strong social safety net and services for all of its citizens like we see in countries such as Germany and Denmark?"
5
Brett, I'm surprised to hear that some Democrats are campaigning against the economic concept of privately-financed commerce and free market competition.
Who are those extreme socialist Democrats? Is it Bernie, who advocates extending a popular health care program based on private health care practitioners? Is it AOC, who proposes addressing the critical issue of climate change by encouraging American enterprises to compete with China in clean energy technology.
Or, is it a straw man that Republicans raise to avoid their disinterest and inability to address any issue of major concern to Americans?
Brett, now that you have declared our government and economy beyond reproach, we can return to bickering over a useless wall across the Sonoran Desert!
3
Democrats are risking political suicide--snatching defeat from the jaws of victory-- if they insist on adopting the Socialist label. They should wise-up.
1
You forgot border migrants running amuck being checked by the leader of the gop.
There are many variables that need to be taken into account when looking at the unemployment stats; you need to look at the overall picture; i.e. has the government made it harder for people to register as unemployed, have people shifted off unemployment to long term sickness benefits etc; have people become solo parents and get that benefit instead of getting the unemployment benefit.
It sounds like Bret is reapplying for his old job at the Wall Street Journal.
2
To a large degree it is an argument about semantics, which keeps politician and opinion writers employed.
Just as the United States is not a pure Democracy, we are Constitutional Democracy. The United States has never been and never was intended to be a pure Capitalist economy. The United States has prospered largely because of how it has tamed the extremes of pure capitalism and democracy.
Capitalism brought the United States plantation agriculture in the South in the early 1800’s, the packing houses highlighted in “The Jungle,” and the environmental effects shown in “Silent Spring”. Most of the great infrastructure development in the U.S., which were the backbone of our 20th century economic development was socialist; Land Grant colleges in the mid-late 1800’s, western expansion of the railroads, the farm-market road systems and electrification of the Midwest, the interstate highway system, the civil aviation system.
Just as in a pure democracy “Loving v Virginia” and Brown v Board of education” would have never even reached the court, the family of victims and the first responders of 9/11 should have never gotten compensation.
Neither Capitalism nor Socialism are goals that should be sought, but are rather tool boxes to borrow from.
4
Bravo, JJ.
Oh, come on, Stephens. As usual you're either blind or, more likely, disingenuous. Capitalism is in a bad odor today because its most visible boosters have been a virulent band of laissez-faire, neonfederate Republicans who will stop at nothing to service moneyed interests and toss the rest of the people to the wolves. In other words, bad people. The reaction is natural and necessary.
4
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
John K. Galbraith
"A joke on the streets of Moscow these days: 'Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true.' " -John Nellis, World Bank
5
Bret- Please stop expecting Democrats to become the extinct moderate Republicans of your youth.
2
@Old Max
As funny as it is true.
Hickenlooper’s campaign died this morning.
Does anyone really think that because a democratic candidate calls himself a name that someone will vote for Trump instead? Is support that thin?
2
Democrats like their capitalism to be regulated and reinforced by a strong social safety net.
Republicans don't like the regulations or the safety net.
3
The tradition of the Democratic party is not socialism, it is the New Deal and the Great Society. Roosevelt gave this nation Social Security and the Wagner Act which put the government on the side of unions and unionization made this a middle class nation in the 1950s and 1960s. Johnson gave us Medicare and Medicaid as well as the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act. Roosevelt established that the federal government had the responsibility for maintaining the economic well being of Americans and Johnson that it had the responsibility to protect their civil rights. This is the tradition that Democrats should run on and yet Democratic politicians act like they know nothing about it.
American Capitalism, as Soviet Socialism. discarded the
"human face" of both -isms. What characterized American Capitalism was unlimited greed and massive deceit, and "buying" the political system by "teaming with it," that is, by controlling it. Money bought power, money now owns the political system and the two parties that dominate it. FDR tried to establish some balance of power between capital and labor. Since the 1970s, that balance has been rolled back, demolished. Now what? Don't bet on the salon progressives of the Democratic party to change it.
The current rigged system that is there for Wall Street is not the Capitalism of the past. We are beyond that. We have Corporate welfare run amuck, a huge inequality due to the deck being stacked against regular Americans. It is worse than ever with Goldman Sachs running DC.
The cabinet, from Secretary of Commerce, EPA, Treasury, Interior, is using our tax dollars to steal from us. POTUS is using our tax dollars to enrich himself and pay for his golfing.
We are not under legitimate system of Capitalism. We are suffering under robber barons.
4
It gets so tiresome reading ideologues like Bret Stephens and George Will who obsess over labels to the exclusion of realities. To both "capitalism" is a buzz-word requiring absolute knee-jerk obiesance regardless of the actual effects of their preferred extremist, purist ideas about it. And just the same for "socialist" -- so uncomfortable with ideological subtleties and ambiguity, they pretend to similar black-and-white definitions with which to bludgeon the likes of a Hickenlooper (who immediately sees such extremist, exclusive use of labels as inherently false and deliberately misleading).
Stephens and Will, who self-flatter in labeling themselves as "moderate" and "centrist" (i.e. "good" and "smart") sure revel in picking nits off lesser beings who, even as they represent the true political center, fail to take a knee to their ideologically pure labeling.
For Pete's sake, there are much more pressing issues for our hot-house "conservatives", aren't there? Perhaps a cursory glance at their own constitutional wrecking ball, Mr. McConnell would be in order?
5
Denmark IS a socialist country. So is Sweden, and to a lesser extent, France and Germany. When right wingers like Mr. Stephens come to understand that having a fair chance at an education, health care, child care, a safe retirement and workplace protection comes out of the social democratic movements that arose in Europe and here in the 19th and 20th centuries, he may begin to understand why capitalism, the brutal exploitation of man by man for the sake of profit, is a dirty word.
2
This column reminds me of an omnibus bill in the Congress. The congressional version includes funding for baby formula, re-naming an airport for Mother Theresa, creating a new holiday, and raising the minimum wage - and abolition of Obamacare. The Stephens version praises the low unemployment rate, innovation, and rising wages, then - surprise! - on his current hobbyhorse, he denounces Representative Omar for anti-Semitism.
Capitalism is NOT the end all of everything. Unmitigated greed is its chief by-product, hardly a trait to be revered.
That being said, Capitalism does get lazy people to work and more energetic people to work harder. This should be its sole purpose. While Capitalism is efficient, it is also incredibly wasteful.
Government should not be capitalist in its outlook. Government is a ‘social’ institution. Likewise, religion.
Mr. Stephens, stop tying to embarrass and pigeon hole Mr. Hickenlooper (Hick) because he will not shout from the rooftops that he’s a capitalist or proclaim capitalism to be above all.
I voted for Hickenlooper four times. I certainly will vote for him again because he’s a good person and deserves to be heard.
Hick will make a GREAT PRESIDENT!
3
The richest city in the world has dirty, crime-ridden, inefficient subways; it warehouses its poor in decaying edifices that breed disease; it attempts to pay its bills on the backs of struggling working people through a regressive tax structure, hidden inflation and fees; its schools are a disgrace; its working class neighborhoods almost entirely racially segregated; the mental illnesses that such an arrangement breeds in thousands of its citizens go largely unaddressed, the facilities for their care having been condemned as dangerous and ineffective while the present patch-quilt arrangement is so costly that every bi-polar vagrant in the city could get a room with service in a good hotel for the same cost; society men and women are appointed to the endless "commissions" to ensure that the Manhattan zona rosa be maintained and expanded as a gated community for the rich; "pencil" skyscrapers have begun to pollute the once classic skyline with the dystopian vista now crowding out the beauty of our past; identity politics is used wholesale by allegedly progressive politicians, mere weapons of mass distraction, more time spent on discussions of transgender issues directly affecting about 0.9% of the populace than such issues as fair wages, true tax reform that would revert to the policy of a 90% bracket for those accumulating obscene amounts of lucre and reshaping our society to make it safe for those who profit from such schemes to continue to do so...
2
"There’s a difference between taming a horse and shooting it.".
And then there's right wing ideologues like Stephens who ignore the reality of it - income inequality, unequal access lack of healthcare, food, housing, education, inequities in sentencing (see Manafort, Paul), the voting and taxation systems that overwhelmingly favor the wealthy, and oh so much more. Stephens is just working his way up to a well paid spot on Fox where he can tell his tales of the woe and suppression he suffered through at the NYT.
1
aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed
Bret should read this--I saw the interview and I believe this is what Hickenlooper meant
1
Capitalism not a dirty word? What is even less justifialble is that socialism had been a dirty word for so long. Thinking of each other's welfare, and not selling to shifty despots shoud be considered pro-social, not anti-social.
1
Yes, I know too many smart people who are willing to "shoot the horse" which is a losing political strategy. Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything about climate change, named the culprit "unregulated capitalism". She waa right - on a broad front - we need to regulate capitalism enough that a sustainable economy is incentivized. How about a 50% reduced corporate tax rate if the company is 50% or more owned by non-managerial workers? How about greenhouse gas or environmental destruction taxes that make solar and wind, and other sustainable technologies, the most economically sensible solutions? How about a minimum livable compensation requirement rather than a minimum wage? This is all possible to do - we the people set the economic playing field for brilliant and socially-responsible entrepreneurs, Hickenlooper and Schultz among them, to compete in.
I think the vast majority of US voters do not understand the European "social dem" model based on capitalism and would likely embrace it if they actually understood it. Meanwhile, it is foolish to use the word "socialist" because of the widespread misperceptions about it and its links with failed authoritarianism of USSR in 20th century, and stupid policies like China's restrictions on freedom of religion even as their "Chinese market socialsm" model soars.
1
Here are some suggestions. I don't care what label you put on them.
1. Institute an efficient universal gov run health care system, say Medicare for All. The data shows we could save over 1.5 TRILLION dollars each year which could better used elsewhere.
2. Return to much more progressive tax rates to encourage the Rich to leave more of their profits in their companies & their companies to pay their workers more, & to discourage the Rich from speculation.
3. Strengthen unions by requiring workers to pay for the union benefits they receive & by enforcing rules on coercion by companies against organization. Follow Germany & require union representation on the boards of large companies.
4. Strongly regulate speculation, e.g. require the buyer of a futures contract to take delivery, require banks to get a court order to sell its end of a mortgage contract, outlaw naked credit default swaps.
5. Stop worrying about the debt & invest in America--fix our crumbling infrastructure, build a better power grid, increase support for education at all levels, fund research, etc. If we grow the economy, the debt will fade into insignificance as in 1946 - 1973.
6. Make the federal gov the employer of last resort with a decent job or paid training for such a job for everyone able to work. There are plenty of things that need to be done. See 5.
http://www.levyinstitute.org/topics/job-guarantee
3
Wait till the tax brakes kick in and spoils the argument.
What a shame there isn't a major centrist party appealing to moderates of both right wing and left wing leanings. We seem to be stuck once again with the 20th century choice of socialism v. fascism. I find the Democrats to be the lesser evil, but often have to take a deep breath and remind myself of that fact after reading about some of their antics. Mostly, I feel disenfranchised as a practical matter by extremists.
No, Bret, Mr. Hickenlooper guessed right when he said, "There are parts of socialism, parts of capitalism, in everything." That's because behind all of the private sector success in the last one hundred years is the public sector that pioneered scientific breakthroughs, that provided protections and social safety nets for workers, that defended our borders, and that established rules of fairness for the market economy. Some of those people work 80-hour weeks too.
What is so egregiously missing from this conversation is essentially what Hickenlooper said. We are a hybrid of socialism and capitalism. The American public sector is the greatest progenitor of capitalism in all history, and it's not getting any credit. It takes on the risks the private sector can not or will not. A few examples:
- Research into semiconductors in the 1940's that shrunk the transistor from the size of a kitchen blender to the size of a pea and beyond. I could stop here.
- Research into elementary particles that led to PET scans and radiation therapy.
- Medical research that led to innovations in pharmaceuticals.
- Research into the hydraulic fracking of shale.
Just to name a few.
All those efforts were conducted by the government or by companies with government funding. The "N" in NASA, NOAA, NIH, NSF, and NIST stands for "National." They are nationalized. They are "socialism." They and others like the DOE, DOD, etc., make a gargantuan contribution to the prosperity of all Americans.
2
By looking at history one can attest that it is unrestrained capitalism that created the need for socialism. It is neither capitalism or socialism as a choice, but how to combine the two systems to protect the small against the giants. And what is exactly capitalism today ? is it Danemark or Canada or USA ? they are all capitalist countries and Bret and the Republican Party have found a new strategy to oppose Democrats : why not have a phony discourse about the choice between capitalism and socialism, without middle ground ! Bernie Sander's program is still in the boundaries of capitalism - with a social consciousness.
1
But what is "socialism"? Republicans have so degraded our political discourse in the last decades that it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion about socialism versus capitalism.
The infamous Tea Party signs declaring, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" are just one sign of the manufactured confusion.
There is a reason millions of Americans are responding to notion––coming not just from Sanders and Warren but also from Trump in his duplicitous way––that our economic order is "rigged." Yes, wages have risen but only very recently and against the backdrop of decades of big gains in productivity and GDP growth. Average household income is higher, but that masks income inequality and the struggle of ordinary families to cope with increases in healthcare costs, tuition and student debt, and housing costs. Countless people lost their savings and/or homes for good in the crisis of 2009 while the investor class was back to enjoying record increases in very short order.
It should surprise no one that the word "capitalism" has lost its luster for millions of people.
1
If what Stephens were saying were true, we wouldn’t be having this debate over capitalism today. Even though the capitalist engine is thriving, times are getting tighter for most of us. That’s capitalism’s problem: the better it does, the worse workers fare. Its other problem, which has been revealed by globalization, is that it does best under authoritarian conditions, not democratic ones. Americans need to be able to define ourselves apart from capitalism in order to save our democracy.
2
All this started when the alleged ex-Republican, Joe Scarborough, who now regrets helping to elect Trump, saw he had a “gotcha” moment when a principled Hickenlooper wanted to avoid simplistic labels. Scarborough traffics in simplistic labels, appealing to his alleged ex-Republican base. I watched the entire interview: it was beyond disgusting when Mrs. Mika Scarborough and then the alleged “branding and marketing expert” (what is that, anyway.?) Donnie Deutsch, piled on. And now, Bret Stephens, piles on. Hickenlooper, a successful businessman and politician, will learn to provide simple answers to the likes of The Scarborough’s of the world.
2
"Socialist" notions have gained traction recently as a reaction to capitalist excesses of the past several decades. Capitalism is great at creating wealth. But, left unregulated and under-taxed, that wealth will be hoarded at the top. Both parties jumped onto the globalization bandwagon, and instead of regulating the pace, allowed the business community to turn it up to 11 and keep it there. A slower pace and more thoughtful implementation might have mitigated the harm done to industrial communities. And the Right has gone overboard in demonizing government since 1980, forgetting how many of our thriving industries got their start. Computers, software, the internet, satellite communications, GPS, cell phones - all these innovations ran through DARPA, NASA, and other (now underfunded) government agencies in their infancy. Then private industry refined the initial technology, improved upon it, found consumer and business applications for it, and mass produced it. Then, of course, tech firms moved all the assembly line jobs associated with it to China, and did all they could to depress wages for programmers. ("No poaching" agreements, lobbying for more H1B visas, etc.) Is it any wonder people mistrust capitalism?
2
Mr. Stephens cites several currently favorable statistics and opines, "None of this should be difficult to celebrate."
But if you're going to celebrate today's 3.8 percent unemployment rate (and, for that matter, the 3.8 percent rate in April 2000), then you have to acknowledge the 10 percent unemployment in October 2009. Capitalism gave us that, too.
So wage growth is at a 10 year high. Why did it take so long? One of the great mysteries of the past decade was when wage growth would finally get going. That it took an economy at full employment to achieve that is not a particularly reassuring result. Capitalism, it seems, can be quite miserly to workers.
One of the sobering realities of the decade following the Great Recession is that the very richest continued to prosper during that difficult time, while everyone else became poorer in real terms. A report by the Federal Reserve said the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw their wealth substantially lower in 2016 than in 2007, while the top 10 percent saw their wealth increase by 11 percent over that period. In good times and in bad, the richest among us get richer.
Mr. Stephens at least gets this right: "Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone."
Capitalism is by far the most efficient and productive way to organize an economy. But left to itself it tends toward severe and morally unjustifiable inequality. Reform it with a blended economy.
2
The major change in the capitalist system that helped to hold off communism, which is not synonymous with socialism, in this country during the 1930s was the advent of labor unions. Unions gave working class people a seat at the table, allowing them to benefit a little more equally from the capitalist system. It is not progressives that are to blame for the criticism of capitalism today, or for the embrace of socialism, but the short-minded, greedy actions of the Republican party, which has all but destroyed those capitalist-saving institutions called labor unions.
1
Adam Smith warned against monopolies and unregulated unethical economic systems. The profit lure that does not produce a more prosperous society needs reigning in.
What Mr. Stephens calls Socialism is really social insurance. True socialist entities owned by and paid for by taxpayers include the police, fire departments, national park service, food inspection, drug safety, the VA, and government workers. All these belong to government and derive their income from taxpayers. I doubt he disagrees with this.
However Mr. Stephens real problem is with popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These are not socialism but social insurance. Taxes are paid to give individuals access to chosen services they want or need in the private sector. The dollars flow to private entities chosen by individuals.
Since all this money flows into the economy it is a boon to private entities. They add, not subtract to the economy and support private entrepreneurship and businesses. However oligarchic corporations remove too many dollars from circulation. Ironically a living wage by recirculating these dollars will reduce the tax burden and add to strengthening companies. If people can't spend we call that a recession.
All modern economies combine public and private business. They strengthen a free market not weaken it. The aim is to make a more prosperous society.
2
I like Hickenlooper, but I dislike Joe Scarborough intensely, especially when he is in his bullying inquisitorial guise. That persistent serving up of the "Gotcha!" question about Hickenlooper's position on capitalism drove me up the wall. Stephens is right in his formulation of the response he should have given, and for his conclusion that, for all intents and purposes the Hickenlooper quest is now at an end, given the parsing Joe's victim squirmed through in that interview.
Knee, meet jerk.
1
Socialism and Capitalism are just names. Ted Cruze said that it was about socializing losses and privatizing the gains. Capitalism isnt working, especially for Millenials. The wealth of one tenth of one percent is grossly unfair. When Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, there were no computers which could coral wealth through markets and statistical methods.
Capitalism is very broken and the GOP model of money and politics is creating a prison for the American people where the super super super majority is not being represented.
1
The lesson the Democrats should take away from their success in the 2018 House midterms is not moderates win, progressives lose as Mr. Stephens suggests. The non cherry picked results were not nearly that clear cut.
The lesson should be: run on policies, not labels. Democratic policies are generally popular on health care, taxes, education, and climate change. Democractic Moderates and Progressives may differ on the details and extent of change but any point on the Democratic spectrum is a winner compared to the GOP position IF you can get voters to vote in their own interest instead of out of fear driven emotion.
The GOP can't govern worth a damn but they are masters at demagoguery and the cynical and dishonest use of labels to incite fear and drive emotions.
A Democratic candidate discussing the nuanced definitions of regulated capitalism vs democractic socialism vs socialism and where they fit in plays into the hands of GOP.
A Democractic candidate discussing the merits of their plan to increase access to health care or college vs the GOP "plan" of more tax cuts for the 0.1% plays into the hands of the one party that still has a soul.
2
People dying for a lack of health insurance should inspire us to use dirty words. Wild disparities in who can and who cannot flourish economically should inspire dirty words. Needing to work three minimum-wage jobs to survive should inspire dirty words. Being at the mercy of global corporations who put profits over the well-being of people everywhere should inspire dirty words. Gig economies that force people to work extremely hard with no guarantee of earning enough should inspire dirty words. Occupational safety and health failures due to the aforementioned ability of corporations to prioritize money only should inspire dirty words. Adam Smith himself, who I assume you worship, said that capitalism would only succeed if embedded in a larger moral system. Today America's religion is the market, aided by a prosperity gospel that would make Jesus throw up. Capitalism is inherently amoral and, not grounded in a larger moral system, harms many while a few get to have far more than anyone needs to have a good life. That fact should inspire some dirty words. Unfettered capitalism also destroys the environment, which will harm many people in the relatively short term and could eventually end human life on the planet. If that does not inspire some dirty words, we are really in deep trouble.
4
I wonder if Mr. Stephens is aware that between 2007 and 2012, income in the United States increased by $5,000,000,000,000.00 of which $90% or $4,500,000,000,000.00 went to the top 5%.
A larger pie is meaningless to a persons that don't get a slice.
I wonder of Mr. Stephens would acknowledge that even Adam Smith had faint faith in "free" markets.
And, maybe Mr. Stephens has an opinion as to how many years, (decades) an individual will have to toil to achieve a stable economic and financial existence.
1
Hickenlooper realizes that pure capitalism is a disaster. If it isn't tempered by social policies like social security and medicare, it drives the people living under it into poverty and brings about extreme inequality. I'm not a capitalist and I'm not a socialist. Like FDR I'm a pragmatist. You and the people on Morning Joe don't seem to realize what a disaster pure capitalism is.
Capitalalism has provided quite a lot for America. But since business schools began teaching that the sole responsibility of a business is to its stockholders, we have a capitalism that fights against the EPA as it regulates to keep our air and water clean and fights against regulations to protect our economy from the effects of greed. Creates a working atmosphere where employees are scared to take vacation time, assuming they get vacation time. Been cracking down on unions to keep payroll down. Sending jobs overseas to keep payroll down. Choosing automation to keep payroll down. Capitalism is not what it used to be.
The problem is not that capitalism is not a effective and proven system for building and sustaining an economy, it is that the very capitalists themselves have to follow an ethical path that is accepted by all for the system to really work. In its extreme, most unregulated form, isn't a Mexican cartel the best example of capitalism?
When greedy capitalists pursue wealth without boundaries and break rules casually because they figure they can always get away with it, they destroy confidence in the opportunities inherently provided within capitalism.
Even extreme capitalist Ayn Rand believed that her "ubermensches" (e.g., Howard Roark and John Galt) were men who "persevered to achieve their values, even as their ability and independence led to conflict with others." When capitalists abandon a level playing field and greedily pursue and hoard money only, the system beaks down, and talent or skills or conscience do not matter anymore.
"America will never be a socialist country" -- Trump's 2019 SOTU speech.
No. What is true is that America will never CALL ITSELF a socialist country. That much we can concede. But Americans love their Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, minimum wage laws, public universities, etc., etc. -- all aspects of 21st Century American life that would have been viewed as "socialist" in the past.
In truth, our system today is very much a mix. And a question about being a "proud capitalist" is about the same as asking: "isn't the giant wealth gap in our country a wonderful illustration of mereitocracy at work?"
As we are witnessing the “most successful economic system” destroy ecosystems, kill forever living species and enslave billions of people in poverty this argument clearly represents a delusional train of thought.
2
There is only one issue on the ballot in 2020, Mr Stephens: Trump. None of you concerns will matter one bit. You're for him or against him. Democrats won't blow this by nominating a socialist or a capitalist, only someone people can't like or trust. They could do that. They might well blow it. But it's gonna be that simple.
@Rover Democrats will definitely blow this because they are so focused on impeaching Trump, they have no record to run on. Look at the field. Not good.
Ah, the glories of pure capitalism. And income inequality soars on.
1
I expect that the president's 2020 campaign staff should be nigh-unto-gleeful about Mr. Stephen's second to last paragraph in this piece. (In the failing New York Times, no less!) It is a masterful example of unwarranted boasting joined to ridiculous reductionism, and entirely congruent with Trump-speak. Thriving economy? To what extent has that been accomplished by this administration's specific actions and policies? Country at peace? What are we to make of the continuing US presences in Syria and Afghanistan, failed negotiations with North Korea, unilateral withdrawal from a major nuclear treaty, not to mention the militarizing of our southern border? Inconclusive Mueller report? Wow, Bret, way to manage public expectations on behalf of a chronically mendacious, blatantly self-dealing and manifestly compromised president! I think I'll wait and see what the special counsel has to say about the specific criminal issues of possible conspiracy with Russia, about obstruction of justice. And, in the meantime, I'll be working very hard to see that Democrats continue to seek the truth, speak the truth and lead with integrity. Does that still matter? Check!
3
Balance is best. If the Democrats are smart they will nominate a centrist to take on the right-wing insanity of the Republicans.
Democrats have always been bad in their messaging. Democrats should be talking about "...a more humane side of capitalism"; "capitalism without greed"; "a more equitable form of capitalism", etc. Instead, they scare some people by jumping into socialism.
This feast or famine proposal is not necessary. America's problem is greedy capitalism and not necessarily capitalism per se.
I have a different take on Hickenlooper’s reply to the on-air question of whether he would call himself a “proud capitalist.” As a general rule, any candidate who self-describes as an “…ist” in our pragmatic society and as anything other than a “proud parent” or as a “proud” native of a town or region is committing the political follies of not only painting themselves into a corner, but also being smugly “proud” about that. Thus, putting aside the varied resonance of “capitalist”, if Hickenlooper had embraced that term, no doubt an enterprising reporter would have found that his entrepreneurial career was significantly assisted by tax breaks, community development spending, or other government assistance. I don’t think that the way to restore competence and character to the White House should be to seek a candidate who bases his or her political identity on labels bestowed by interviewers rather than on the candidate’s ideas and achievements.
So much gets to hide under the euphemism of “capitalism.” If capitalism were truly practiced as described here, it would be as pure and perfect as the perpetual motion machine, as table-top cold fusion, as the alchemy of turning lead into gold.
Everyone loves capitalism in the abstract: hard work, enginuity, risk taking, innovations that improve the human condition, and magnanimous success stories who share their goof fortune with the poor out of gratitude for the free-market system that made their success possible.
But the reality is ugly. Billionaires flood Washington with lobbyists, and buy out state legislatures out right. Regulators turn a blind eye to polluters that donate to the administration’s party. Special tax breaks and corporate welfare run up the deficit, for the next generation of working people to pay, or go to war for.
It is a simple, eternal matter of the strong preying on the weak. Under the guise of “capitalism,” the government itself, (which the founders created to protect the weak from tyrants,) has bern hijacked, and is used by the ultra-wealthy as its most powerful weapon of exploitation.
I would love to see platonic capitalism in America. But that is not what we have here now. Moreover, simply making taxes more progressive, at the level used in Eisenhower’s time, is not “socialst” either. It is a matter of balance, how to make the most people as prosperous as possible, sustainably.
Does Bret Stephens ever leave Manhattan to talk to any of capitalism's losers -- the hundreds of millions here and around the world who struggle to make a living wage, pay rent or afford adequate health care?
If he does, he sure doesn't show it here. And that's typical of the unempathetic blindness that's causing many to question capitalism run amok. Time for a listening tour, Bret.
2
Reading your column gives me the impression that the right will not discuss what socialism is or what it can do for the people and the country because it threatens their ego, their belief in American exceptionalism and their Christian, god-given right to impress on the rest world how to live - in the freedoms of Capitalism!
Except, of course, if you are a woman, of a person of color or an immigrant.
I agree with much of what Bret Stephens says. Yet to allow dramatically uneven distribution of the fruits of this economy invites serious popular discontent in the future. The only obvious solution: Welfare Capitalism. Not a new idea,just one that seems to have been buried beneath the loud cries for “Socialism “. — asystem never quite fully explained but somehow morally superior to Democratic Socialism. or Welfare Capitalism,call it what you will.
General Bonespurs is about to launch us into a war with Iran, to please the Saudi Royal family, and your problem is that John Hickenlooper isn't 'centrist' enough? Tell you what, Stephens. Now that we know that Hickenlooper worked 70-90 hrs a week building his business, can we get a peek at the tax returns of the so-called 'businessman' who is actually running the country (to make sure he's not a Russian agent)?
"Democrats still seem to think 2020 is going to be a referendum on the president. It’s not. It’s going to be a choice." Speaking of 'choice', Stephens, where is wealth inequality again? Is it nominal, or at an all time historic high? And as long as you are defending capitalism, tell us how wealth inequality can be at levels not seen since before the French Revolution, without finding ourselves under another guillotine? I don't think anyone who pretends to 'defend' capitalism can do so without reference to that wealth inequality. Which makes Hickenlooper its defender, much more than you are.
1
I agree with your views regarding capitalism. Most Americans are ignorant of economics. Many people can't define capitalism, socialism and the welfare state. They confuse these systems with political systems. They associate capitalism with democracy. Many people also vote against their economic self interest. Capitalism needs reulations
We can and should always make improvements especially when those improvements empowers people or helps people in need. But those efforts should not destroy a system that really is the envy of the world. Sadly, everyday there are people literally dying to get in to the US. Why? It is not perfect by any means but so far it is the best the world has to offer and the rest of the world knows it. Hickenlooper has a great capitalist story but he can't disown it in order to pander to the socialists that forgot socialism is dead.
1
The S-word is a Republican false issue. That's why stealth Republican apologists - no names mentioned here - are always talking about it. They think it works to their advantage, politically, to keep harping on it. And so they harp.
And it probably does work to their advantage. The last false issue they had was that Barack Obama was not a citizen of the United States, was a muslim, and was born in Kenya or on the far side of the moon. I think on last count, about 30% of Americans still believe that Obama is not an American citizen.
I also think you may know who that 30% supports now...
For someone so cocksure about capitalism, Stephens does rant and rant.
Maybe it’s because capitalism can’t answer the big questions. Impotence before inequality and environmental destruction will bring it down.
It's a race to the bottom and always will be.
Two questions that Bret Stephens avoids:
1) Is the US the most "capitalistic" of the Western democracies?
2) Has the US economic system "served the masses" better than in other Western democracies?
For the record, my answer to #1 is yes; to #2 it's no.
For the record, Bret, what are your answers?
2
Fudge, fudge, fudge! Mr. Stephens is a master of it. And this one is just terrific. While railing against democratic socialism, he recommends this as a likely winner for Democrats: "To prevail, a moderate Democrat will need to behave likewise. The message can go like this: Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone", which is...democratic socialism.
2
Nobody wants to end capitalism.
What we’re talking about is even chance for everybody to have a decent life on earth (before go to heaven, I hope).
1
I am reminded of the wonderful solution the Republicans had to our health care crisis. Yes, nothing. Maybe the Dems are the party of ideas that seek to address the ailments of our society and will toss in a few losers from time to time in the effort to solve some problems. The socialism tirade on the right is just pitiful politicking.
2
Capitalism is not endangered in this country, let's stop pretending it is.
1
The anti-capitalism fervor gripping the Democratic Party will not end well for it. And the euphemism for anti-capitalism, "greed", isn't going to cut it either. Americans like to make money, and they don't mind working for it. They want the "opportunity" to do so. Capitalism provides opportunity.
Anyone who has started and succeeded at a small business understands the impact of big government. Progressives are no friend of small businesses. Considering these businesses account for a significant percentage of job growth, democrats are foolish to alienate them.
1
“An economy in which private property is protected, private enterprise is rewarded, markets set prices and profits provide incentives will, over time, generate more wealth, innovation and charity — and distribute each far more widely — than any form of central planning.”
This textbook-like definition of free market capitalism, free from “central planning”, demonstrates an ideology of an economic system that cannot “think” for itself and, as a consequence, cannot plan or be self-aware - it is a let-the-market-decide, trickle-down Magic Eight Ball attitude where claimed incentives and “charity” from profits are dependent on a Magic Eight Ball, which may or may not be widely distributed and certainly not fairly nor equitably (since dependent upon individual whims and conscience), and from which there are certainly no commitments. Such an unfettered system demands protections and rewards for itself, while allowing itself to ignore the needs of society as a whole.
Free societies - people - demand protections and rewards, too. If one accepts the reality free markets and free society are interdependent, which is contrary to the above “baked” definition by Mr. Stephens, then human solutions to human problems can be addressed.
1
The problem with capitalism....is the same as the problem with the GOP and Conservatives: accountability.
The game Monopoly illustrates the intrinsic flaw: without restraint, the “wealthiest” prevent movement by making it unaffordable. That, of course, is the goal of the game. It is also the outcome of unaccountable capitalism. Success is accompanied by defensive measures to maintain capital and prevent incursions into profit centers that include crushing competitors, purchasing competitors, applying “legal constraints” on competitors. When growth has achieved a certain level, political manipulation, lobbying and campaign donations (bribery) and hiring politicians’ families and retired politicians as lobbyists promoting businesses and making laws and policies that enrich them further. Finally, they use their influence to dictate laws and policies.
The outcome is dwindling competition, lower wages and cheap raw materials achieved by “outsourcing”, interlocking boards of directors. If it’s a game, it is not as challenging as chess, but still fun. It’s not a game. It strips away competition, reduces workers and consumers to non-human distractions, it renders the environment into an “externality” and makes government an arm of plutocrats.
“Free Markets” are a slogan based on a lie lifted from Smith. Laissez faire is mentioned once in The Wealth of Nations, utterly out of context. Smith spent far more time compelling care of the poor than he did on unregulated markets.
3
The only problem capitalism has is the "winner take all" mentality that seems to have possessed some of our biggest capitalists.
I had a teacher in high school who said that the saving grace of capitalism was our ability to modify it, in the USA at least. A democracy can do that.
In the game of Monopoly, someone ends up with all the money and real estate; everything goes back into the box and the winners and losers go back to real life - the game ends.
Life is not a board game, yet there seems to be a conviction, among many, that there be a winner who gets it all and the losers be punished with poverty, hunger, illness, and all that entails; while the winners must not be "punished" for their success. This "game" is one that is impossible to avoid or get out of.
It is time to remember that capitalism is a market system and not a governing philosophy as is democracy. We, the people, should determine the rules and those rules should allow for the greater good.
2
Of course most Americans, even democrats, want to live in a country where one is rewarded for work and meritocracy prevails. However, the goal of every capitalist is to drive competitors out of the market so that they can control the price. Too many segments of our economy are no longer free competitive markets and operate by manipulating the market and consumers with exaggerations, out right lies, and bribing politicians. Healthcare is a prime example: the government is not able negotiate the price of drugs in that market, 40% of doctors are children of doctors (the supply doctors is limited by artificial barriers), and when you're dying of cancer you will pay any price Merck or Pfizer wants to charge for your drugs. Now is not the time to eliminate regulation as our President and Republicans insist, now is the time to pass and enforce laws that promote free markets and eliminate corruption in those markets.
2
It's a scary thought to think that the huge amount of Democratic candidates vying for attention, the public perception of a thriving economy and the job market may undo more important issues such as justice, honesty, morality, immigration, health care, and the number one issue that should concern us all, climate change. If we don't reduce our carbon emissions 45% by 2030, nothing else will matter because we will all be hurt by the harmful effects.
1
Unclear how Bret could possibly come to the conclusion that 2020 will NOT be a referendum on Trump? Am I missing something?
2
The capitalism that won the contest against Soviet Communism is NOT the capitalism we practice today. Almost to the day that the USSR collapsed, the country club set began outsourcing jobs, fighting minimum wage increases, watering down SS cost of living increases, deregulating finance and doing everything else they could to increase their own wealth, even at the expense of their fellow Americans.
That economic inequality could become a rallying cry would have been unthinkable in 1975. It is the capitalists themselves who have made Bernie Sanders and AOC possible.
540
@Green Tea
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system around - except for all the others. Capitalism may have made Sanders and AOC possible, but it also made Karl Marx. Does our economic system need to improve? Yes, of course. Has it improved since the 18th century? Yes. In an ongoing unending process, capitalism has to forever be tweaked to meet the challenges before it. So now the challenges are income inequality and globalization. In ten years it will be robotics. The problem is how we distribute and harness capitalism's gains and energy, it should not be the engine itself.
16
@Green Tea
Indeed. One way to look at the "Cold War" is as a joint cooperation agreement between two failed systems. They propped each other up, like two canted walls at a corner. Neither was able to succeed- nay survive- without the other.
If history did anything other than demonstrate that communism was an utterly flawed system, at the same time it utterly displayed the failure of unretrained capitalism.
It is a sign of the vacuity of conservatism that it ignores the simple fact that lassez faire has, everywhere it was employed...everywhere...produced the same result: enormous economic swings, repeated boom-bust cycles, gluts and dearth, great concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and widespread poverty among the many.
Now, to be fair, it does encourage innovation and, properly restrained, is as useful as fire.
Why conservatives continue to sport those silly Ayn Rand pink goggles is a mystery to me. America is more tied to the idea of unrestrained capitalism than anywhere else in the world; and we have to most grinding poverty, and the worst wealth mal-distribution since the Great Depression to show for it.
Conservatives react to 'capitallism' like drunks to alcohol. They can't handle what is to the rest of us a useful good; they lose their good sense.
35
@Green Tea. See the Roman Republic in the years right after its final defeat of Carthage, when the privileged found themselves unbound to exploit the weak and disorganized ---
16
The fact that capitalism is, at the moment, not the sexiest word, or unable to evoke celebratory feelings, is hardly the fault of Democratic freshman of the new Congress.
If capitalism is so tarnished by the excesses of America's Second Gilded Age that a presidential candidate—and "poster child of American capitalism"—can't handle a softball question on breakfast television, then perhaps a deeper conversation within the body politic is needed.
Besides, to revisit age-old questions isn't something to fear. Asking old questions is a way of finding new answers; it's a process of renewal.
But the idea of Democrats leading a Bolshevik insurgency is as laughable as the idea of Republicans reinvigorating democratic capitalism.
221
Capiltalism, defined by Marx, became possible when a person can use the proceeds of their work to build a means to employ others to do the work for them. The apparent efficiency in capitalism depends upon the new laborers being paid less than what their work made, and the owner of the “capital” keeping the difference.
In its purported purest form, capitalism fosters hard work, saving, risk taking, innovation. It purportedly depends on owners knowing their property will remain theirs and their estates’. At core, the incentive for such hard work and risk-taking is possessing more.
But the desire to possess more can be subverted: the same desire can be fulfilled by theft.
There is no instrinsic attribute of theoretical capitalism that prevents it from being subverted into theft. To the contrary, the maintenance of a “free market” and “private property” requires a miltatrized government to enforce and perpetuate this framework. At the same time, the government, ours, was designed by the founders to protect the weak from the strong, as there is no intrinsic attribute of being strong that prevents the strong from preying on the weak: to the contrary, being able prey on the weak is the essence of being strong.
Everything, in other words, depends on a government. But our government has been hijacked by the ultra wealthy, who flood Washington with lobbyists, exploit tax loopholes, off-shore their profits, pollute, and engorge with corporate welfare.and put the nation in deeper debt.
3
American Capitalism has not worked for a vast number of Americans. Visit any large inner city or go to the deep south. Or visit an Indian Reservation. How can anyone think that it is when so many people live in poverty? Ask a homeless person if capitalism is working for him or her. Capitalism without checks is like the game of Monopoly. A better system of Capitalism would include universal health care, better retirement plans, & better education for all. Of course, American Capitalism works for the top 10% and pays for the largest social program on planet earth, the US Military.
6
It all depends on how they 'classify' unemployment; you might only work two hours a week and they classify you as employed. Governments are known to be very shrewd and misleading when it comes to unemployment statistics.
2
I saw Hickenlooper being interviewed by Joe Scarborough. I was waiting for Hickenlooper to say that he believes in Capitalism practiced fairly - where equal opportunity truly exists. Not the way it's practiced today where too many oligarchs and plutocrats call the shots - in order to enrich and benefit themselves.
1
"An economy in which private property is protected, private enterprise is rewarded, markets set prices and profits provide incentives will, over time, generate more wealth, innovation and charity — and distribute each far more widely — than any form of central planning."
This is, in general, true. The problem is that many treat it as true in all situations, in all regards. For example, markets do a lousy job of setting prices for and allocating health care. Eliminating environmental interventions in the name of free enterprise and private property rights produces global warming, and may lead to a catastrophic collapse of the system itself. The key question is how to gain the benefits of decentralized economics while limiting its negatives. Mindless extremism in either direction is counterproductive.
2
Capitalism never calculates the greed of the individuals running the process. Instead of continuing to try to ram it down the throats of the millions who never benefit by that process due to this greed, why not look at a hybridization of the process that would actually factor in a social conscience?
3
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of and supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose goals don't appeal to most Democrats or any Republicans; two of many from the DSA website:
1. "...direct ownership and/or control of much of the economic resources of society by the great majority of wage and income earners." This is plain old Marxism/Communism; it hasn't worked elsewhere and won't appeal to US voters.
2. "...massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector, in order to provide the main source of new funds for social programs, income maintenance and infrastructure rehabilitation...." As Margaret Thatcher so aptly put it, "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
And, as academics know, socialism is supposed to be an intermediate step between capitalism and communism.
"Free everything for everybody" is a great slogan until people realize that it has to be paid for--via increased taxes.
Abolishing ICE, open borders, Green New Deal, Medicare-for-All and turning the means of production over to workers are suicidal platform planks for the Democratic Party and can only lead to another four years of Trump.
@Mal T I don't see the problem in any of the 5 issues you raise. And yes, please be for continuing to give free things to big agriculture, the fossil fuel industry, defense contractors, etc. They deserve free stuff, so let's support them with our taxes!
2
@Mal T
1. Do you want Exxon, Amazon snd Walmart to own and control "the economic resources of society?" I don't. Let the workers have some control over their lives.
2. Consider the massive redistribution of income from the wage earners to corporations and the wealthy since we "opened up to China."
Lastly, paying for a social safety net for all by increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy sounds good after the tax cut ripoff we just went through.
2
@Mal T
Wow, thanks for posting those great ideas from the Democratic Socialist website!
I had no idea the DSOC folks were as humane and bold in their thinking!
"Turning the means of production over to workers" - is that a "platform plank" of the Democrats? I must'a missed that one, Mal, but I am DEFINITELY going to vote Democrat now!!!
2
Terms like "capitalism" and 'socialism" are tossed about as though they were religions. But they don't offer salvation or damnation. Those who have benefited, such as Trump who inherited great wealth, sing the praises of unrestrained, non-managed capitalism, whereas those who have been consigned to working class oblivion (slaves, serfs, proletarians) might choose an alternative method of economic and social organization.
Ultimately, the issue is one of whether one believes that the economic structure, and institutional arrangements supported by laws, that is, by governments, should serve the country or that the country and governments should be subservient to those who run the economy. Who wins? Who loses?
2
Ah, the relevance of semantics. If only it could predict elections. Who thought "make America great again" as an obvious cry for a racist and misogynist America would become the mantra of the oppressed blue colar worker in middle America? Who thought a centrist friend of Wall Street would disenfranchise so many potential voters in some states that we would have again a president elected with less votes than his opponent?
Since everyone's predictions were dead wrong in 2016, let's at least have a debate about "the strong economy" that is pushing more people into poverty and is creating a massive debt for future generations.
3
Private enterprise is good. American capitalism has divorced itself from private enterprise in many respects. There have been too many 'price fixing' convictions, in my lifetime, to have much confidence in 'market valuation'. The better mouse trap does not always make it to market if some huge conglomerate doesn't benefit by it. Advertisement is the holy grail, not quality of product.
Unfettered capitalism is doomed by inherent human greed. History has proven that fact.
3
@FJG
Asks some artists and crafts people about corporations. They send people to craft shows to scope out the offerings, and they may buy one item which is then replicated and sold as their design. Try suing for violation of copyright and see who has the better legal team and can withstand years of legal battles. They win every time. You might even call it the Trump method.
2
What about the deficit? The ballooning deficit and horrid balance of trade numbers are not political talking points. They have real economic consequences and give the government nothing to address an economic downturn. Further consumer debt is at an all time high. This is a sugar high economy. I also can’t help wondering if crooked Trump isn’t cooking the books the way he hid his school records and tax returns. He uses intimidation to paint a more positive image of himself while hiding the moral rot in his soul. Why not the economy too?
3
Take a victory lap, Bret!
Spiraling health care costs. Historic and growing gap between the rich and poor. Billionaire oligarchs immune from prosecution for massive white collar crimes. A generation of college grads saddled with crippling debt. Housing prices beyond the reach of this generation.
Low unemployment statistics don’t tell the tale of part time and minimum wage jobs that are not keeping up with the rising costs of energy, health care, housing, insurance and education.
Citizens United now enables corporations to not just influence but control politicians elected by hapless voters. There’s a fine line between capitalism and fascism and the country has crossed that line, veering into kleptocracy.
What is the alternative but to wave the banner of “socialism”? Which for most simply means providing a safety net for the majority of Americans not benefitting from the largesse of your magnificent plutocrats.
4
In today's opinion pieces by Mr. Stephens and Mr. Cohn, both pontificate at length on the defects and virtues, respectively, of democratic socialism without really bothering to define it. The following is from Mirriam-Webster's Usage Guide. You're welcome.
"...systems of social democracy, now often referred to as democratic socialism, in which extensive state regulation, with limited state ownership, has been employed by democratically elected governments (as in Sweden and Denmark) in the belief that it produces a fair distribution of income without impairing economic growth.."
3
The Governor is not 'proud' to be labelled a capitalist because the stats mentioned by Mr. Stephens do not reflect the true reality: wages are stagnant, inequality is growing, privacy is eroding and the infrastructure is crumbling (not to mention the environment). How many 'quality' jobs are being created? How many newly minted grads are getting jobs paying enough so they can pay off their student loans? This was a lazy column Mr. Stephens. We know you have to talk like a Conservative once in awhile to maintain your position but don't insult our intelligence with this version of cardboard Capitalism. The Governor was right to squirm.
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This article just highlights how ignorant many Americans on both sides are. What people call "capitalism" here is not, as many think, a free market. The free market doesn't exist (and never did). In the system we have, capitalism is the partnership of business and government to create conditions that are favorable to the creation of profit for the ownership class. That's the defining feature of capitalism and has been since its origins in Renaissance Italy. And what people like Stephens and the rest of the Republican right wing call "socialism" is nothing more than an attempt to reconfigure the wealth of society in a more equitable way within existing economic structures. There's nothing scary about that, is there? Just because Bernie Sanders doesn't know enough to accurately define his terms is not an excuse for Stephens to spread this nonsense in the NY Times.
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Stephens, who sees the harm Trumpism is doing to the nation and the Republican Party, nevertheless will not miss his chance to brand the Democrats with the “socialist” label. While appearing reasoned, his writings on this subject are just another way Republicans spread their mythology.
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Straight answers not dictated by polling are certainly endangered, but this comes from trying to please a diverse constituency rather than leading. But in looking at the “new” Democratic view of capitalism, much of this is being led by politicians who have never participated in the growth of a business or creating jobs, who have uninspiring legislative records and who propound fictions about how Denmark and Sweden are better than the US owing to their socialist policies. Then there is the observation that many progressives are simply not old enough to have had enough experience in the workplace to come to fact-based conclusions. What took place between NYC and Amazon is a harbinger of what these new attitudes will bring to our economy - nothing good.
1
"One of the reasons why the right-wing charge of 'socialism' against the Democratic Party rarely stuck was that it was generally untrue."
A deeply misleading statement.
During the McCarthy Period after WWII, allegations of "communism" or "communist sympathies were fearsome charges.
Whether the allegations were "generally untrue" or - in the end - "stuck" - did not matter, since the domestic political purpose of such attacks was to halt the social movements and New Deal reforms of the 1930s.
The attacks "stuck" in the ways that counted. FDR's universal health care - taken out of his Social Security bill as a compromise with the right and to ensure swift passage - was, after WWII, red-tagged as "socialist" - and thus never had a chance to be reconsidered...
...leaving us with the expensive and bad U.S. health care system of today.
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I enjoyed Mr. Stephens latest effort setting up Strawmen to knock down. First, the 'socialistic' Dems are hardly actual socialists. They are Neo New Dealers. Secondly, the columnist ignores the real unemployment rate, the U6, which is 7.7%. He could also check out the unemployment/under-employment rate for folks over 50 years old. That's a lot of us. The poverty rate is something he could easily look up as well. It's about 12 percent of the population, or 43 million people, but if you include those on the line, it's much higher. As for his dream that we are living in "An economy in which private property is protected, private enterprise is rewarded, markets set prices and profits provide incentives," the reality is that semi-monopolies are price-gouging us in numerous industries because anti-trust laws are gathering dust while just sitting there on the books. The geniuses who run our economy blew it up with their bundled derivatives. Mr. Stephens needs to get behind proper regulation of the banks etc. He doesn't seem to know what actually existing capitalism is doing. Adam Smith would not approve.
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Seems to me that Hickenlooper answered perfectly by refusing to be pinned down with simplistic labels. He answered the questions with nuance; you know, that thing that used to be prevalent before Twitter, Trump, AOC, etc. If Hickenlooper keeps this up, I just may vote for him!
What Stephens characterizes as socialism (e.g. Bernie Sanders) is really just the needed restraints on capitalism that he acknowledges are necessary. Environmental regulation, progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, empowerment of unions, health care for all, bank regulation, etc. None of the Democrats are espousing a socialistic economic system that prevents a hard-working entrepreneur from succeeding and enjoying his success. No one wanjts state owned businesses to replace private enterprise (except maybe for health insurance). Any of the potential Democratic candidates would, as President, foster the continued success of American capitalism.
3
Corporations are perfectly willing to be good stewards of the environment. They also want a level playing field, i.e. every firm must do it. The only way to achiever that is for the government to set certain thou shalt nots with teeth.
Teeth: In 1967, MD EPA told our plant manager that he had two years to stop putting a minor pollutant into the local river. When he asked, "what if we can't find a way?", they replied, "there is a way, shut down your plant" .
I got a blank check from the boss to find a way and two years later the pollutant was being sold as a commercial product. No profit but no plant shutdown.
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I don't know why John Hickenlooper refused to answer the question, but I think he was spot on to refuse to discuss labels. In my opinion, the refusal is not trying to have it both ways. A candidate need not assign a label to himself/herself. The news media is too obsessed with labels, rather than with actual policy proposals and what the policies may accomplish. I recall reading about a poll in which respondents were asked what socialism means to them. The results were all over the map. In the political arena, there is no consensus about the definition of socialism. I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, but I disagreed with his emphasis on labeling himself a Democratic Socialist, which sometimes impeded discussion of his actual policies.
Setting up straw men to tear down is a classic rhetorical fallacy.
The excesses and failings of Capitalism are the concern, not Capitalism itself; the US now has the same wealth inequality as China. Nearly all of the growth in GDP since Reagan has gone to the top 0.01%, after inflation. Unlimited black money is now flowing into national politics. US debt is skyrocketing but the benefits accrue mostly to the rich, and the Right is only concerned when Democrats are in office. 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency. The leading cause of bankruptcy is medical expense.
Purposefully distorting legitimate concerns for the stability of our country makes you a demagogue and a partisamn, Mr. Stephens, not a legitimate contributor to our common good.
"Bret L. Stephens has been...at The Wall Street Journal and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. "
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Compare today's Roger Cohen op ed with that of Bret Stephens. Cohen provides a nuanced discussion of the many benefits of state sponsored social policies that fall under the general rubric of socialism in the European context. His discussion demonstrates that socialism, especially in its democratic form, does not fit some abstract dictionary definition of state ownership of the means of production. Also, there is no need to require either/or abstractions of capitalism and socialism. Stephens, on the other hand, seems to affirm bright lines and litmus tests -- Either capitalism or socialism. And, of course, capitalism is just wonderful in its consequences. We must get beyond Stephens crude approach both in our policies and well as our political discourse if we are to make our democracy functional.
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Bret, I would like to know your definition of "socialism." If the word connotes the welfare-state practices of many European countries and the "New Deal" policies of Franklin Roosevelt (which I believe is Sander's take on the term), then, absurdly, so-called "socialism" may well be capitalism's salvation. Everyone knows that Roosevelt helped save our capitalist way of life through his (socialist?) New Deal policies--through massive, transformative government intervention.
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There is a middle way between Capitalism and Socialism. It has however not been practiced because the international financial transactions have not included that option. The Islamic financial system served large empires when Europe was in dark ages. Since the fall of the Ottoman empire, that system was vanquished. In brief, the Islamic way (capitalism plus socialism) allows for trade, private ownership of property and creation of wealth. Profit making in trade is allowed as long as it is not exorbitant. The citizens are taxed at 2.5% per annum of their liquid assets held at the end of the year. These assets exclude the primary home and items needed for daily use and consumption. There are no other exemptions or loop holes. The banks are cooperatives where depositors are shareholders. The banks do not give out loans but become a party to transaction and share both in profit or loss of the enterprise. The whole society is linked through such shared transactions. Healthcare is free and social welfare is on the top of the agenda for elected leaders. A system like this yields to lower rate of poverty and near elimination of the super wealthy. This is a just and fair system wherein everyone shares the highs and lows of the economy. We can call it “Sharism”.
Firstly, no Dem that espouses the merits of capitalism has any chance of a nomination. Secondly, the sane Dems are in an untenable position because capitalism and redistribution cannot peacefully coexsist. And I agree that the objective is "restrained capitalism" or "compassionate capitalism" this is not in the Dem lexicon. Yet capitalism is the most successful, powerful engine for producing the highest and most all inclusive economic prosperity.
These Nordic countries are very efficient at spreading around whatever wealth there is to be had. But, really, what significant value have they contributed to human welfare in a larger context?
Which of them has originated any vaccines or other life-saving modalities? Which of them has developed something equivalent to the iPhone? Which of them has made contributions to our understanding of the human genome, neuroscience, or many other scientific fields?
Capitalism may have its (correctable) excesses, but as Stephens has written: "An economy in which private property is protected, private enterprise is rewarded, markets set prices and profits provide incentives will, over time, generate more wealth, innovation and charity — and distribute each far more widely — than any form of central planning."
Those on the left boast of their self-proclaimed, reality-based politics. With respect to their embrace of central planning (see Elizabeth Warren's latest proposals), nothing is further from the truth.
Jasper
"John Hickenlooper ought to be a poster child for American capitalism. "
No. The poster children should be those bankrupted by healthcares costs, or those completely shut out from receiving care because it is too expense. They should include those saddled by $1.5 trillion (and rising) student loan debt. They should include those victims of the financial industry--the 5 million who lost homes during the great recession while the financial industry received hundreds of billions in bailouts. We can also include those who are victims of pollution created by our energy sector.
Free markets are good. But our poster child is a victim of predatory capitalism. And all too many of those who have financially reaped the rewards of predatory capitalism have left a trail of victims in their wake. They should not be celebrated.
We are a dysfunctional and immoral society that is unsustainable.
1
American oligarchs by their steadfast rejection of any policy that lessens the harms and excesses of capitalism have made capitalism a dirty word. Their approach differs greatly from their brothers ' and sister's accross the sea who are willing to grant their workers more power and temper the excesses of capitalism.
I have no problem with a regulated capitalist system. The operative word here is "regulated". I do have a problem with "rapacious" capitalism...the kind being practiced in the United States today.
Why are we even debating this ?? and why are we allowing Republicans to frame this debate ?
No one not Sanders or Warren or any other " liberal Democrat " is talking about dismanteling capitalism. Liberals and progressives are only pointing out how capitalism has been preverted by the wealthy and powerful to have most of the wealth and political power go to them which has left many Americans behind with little hope of economic advancement.
Controls and fairness need to be put back in place on taxes, investments and banking to create a fairer America. Education should not only be for the wealthy or a life long economic burden of student loans.
I think of our economy today as Capitalism “run amok.” Our economy is being influenced by a President run amok. He has shown the people to be a grifter who is only concerned about his bottom line. In the meantime the middle class work longer hours to live from pay check to paycheck.
There are many without healthcare, many without affordable housing, many without access to a rewarding education and many in dangerous neighborhoods with no way out. I haven’t even talked about the lack of concern shown by this administration and his capitalist friends for the environment.
So you think a Social Democrat will lose out to the Imperial Grand Wizard! I think we are better than that.
Why waste time taking issue with Mr. Stephens? In the world he lives in, everyone is doing well-you know "could be better but can't complain" sorts of things. If you accept a million dollar annual family income plus generational wealth as the norm, you'd feel the same way he does. Unfortunately, Mr. Stephens, this not a place where most of us live. You should consider stepping out into the rest of the world once in awhile. Or just ask the people who wait on you at the restaurant, clean your house, take care of your kids, do your laundry, mow your lawn. I'm not so they'd be so enthusiastic about the way capitalism works in America right now.
"The most successful economic system shouldn’t be a dirty word.". Like socialism , capitalism has managed to turn the word into an epithet all on its own. Russia, Venezuela, pre 1945 UK and pre 1929 U.S. all contributed to giving their systems a bad name. Let the Democrats to my left push for the successful European style reforms and programs (please!), but also give capitalism by name a positive if qualified shout out. We need a predominantly market economy, but not what passes for capitalism today.
I agree with Bret that part of Sanders appeal in 2016 was that he came across as real, as opposed to Hilary, who came across as someone who poll tested what blouse to wear in the morning. But this massive lurch to the left is still disturbing. As Roger Cohen says elsewhere, calling the Dems socialists in the past has never really stuck: but what Cohen, a liberal himself does not understand is that conservatives always suspected that the Democrats secretly were socialists deep in their hearts. Well, those suspicions are now validated. Let's hope our economy doesn't have to pay the price.
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Brett, as much as I like most of your articles, this is not one. To me, your sweeping opinions make it easy to dismiss some very important changes that need to be made in our system. Using the words, socialism vs capitalism, are just red flags to gin up the audience and avoid the reality of how to address inequality on all levels in our society. How can we improve? How can we address issues without the same old platitudes that keep us from facing reality and keep us fighting each other? Your words are important...
Personally, my entire life I have had capitalism rammed down my throat, with the people benefiting off the system promising they know what's best for me. Meanwhile, a whole generation is sunk with debt, good jobs are slim despite the employment rate being good and people work multiple jobs and side gigs to get by.
Social programs and empathy towards anyone else but yourself is demonized, our infrastructure is falling apart, our country gets dumber as the humanities are looked down upon and cut from universities, and artists can rarely afford to live in our major cities. It's either be a tech bro or investment banker or be poor.
Frankly, I am not a diehard socialist but I find it thrilling that capitalism is finally earning its reputation - as bad-tasting medicine that helps the doctor and supplier, not the patient.
Bret Stephens is one Republican (maybe former I am not sure) Democrats should hire as a political consultant. He just gave you free advice. Take it. Like me and many other voters needed to recapture swing states, you don't need to offer an all you can eat buffet.
Personally, I feel Trump is such a departure from what is right about our nation. The rule of law, foreign meddling, cybersecurity and climate change are the issues everyone should be talking about. These are the issues, Trump has dumped or disregarded. IMHO they are the critical issues moving forward. Indictments galore and blatant disregard of our constitution along with childish twitter feeds can be showcased and highlighted throughout the campaign. Remember most voters are so tired of empty promises they don't want to hear anything beyond saving Medicare and Social Security. Stop there; talk about ways to reform those programs and list the reasons Trump needs to be defeated. Otherwise I fear we have another 1972 all over again. McGovern v Nixon. Though predictably on either side, no landslide.
Since I am reading this on a weekend, I am not going to spend the time to research Bret Stephens’ historical collections of musings on the shortcomings of the Democratic Party. However, even though he notes in this article that the Dems were getting it about right with regard to the economy until “about a year ago”, I am going to wager that his articles from years ago are littered with denunciations of all economic ideas associated with Democrats. His approach is a classic variation on the “slippery slope” argument. Basically, it is “Well, NOW they’ve gone too far”. Even though that is ALWAYS the argument that Mr. Stephens has made with regard to the Democratic Party for his entire professional life, as the entire political landscape has shifted dramatically toward his beloved Right Wing. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made regarding the Democratic Party. Mr. Stephens’ criticisms in this case may even have some validity. But the last thing that the Dems need to be doing is fashioning their political message on what Bret Stephens finds palatable. As he notes often, he loves Trump’s policy, he just doesn’t like the position of Trump’s pinky as he sips his tea...EGADS!
We had something called the Great Depression, maybe you read about it?
Since that time, the unalloyed capitalism of the 19th and early 20th century has not been extant anywhere in the advanced industrialized democracies. What we have instead is macroeconomic management to bring economy out of slump (this happened most recently in 2009 and after), social insurance (pensions, unemployment, medicare etc) and protections for labor rights. To advocate capitalism without all these provisos is to return us to the world before the Depression, ie to set us back almost by a century. To have a litmus test of advocating capitalism must be an attempt to roll back all that has been achieved in our American form of social democracy.
Since semantics and image are important, may I suggest that Democrats start using the term "Social Capitalism"?
And then define it as a free market economy that believes in leveling the opportunity playing field wherever necessary, and making sure all have access to education, health care, food, and reasonable housing?
Just asking.
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@Glenn Ribotsky
We already have such a system. It's called the volunteer military. If you want "three hots and a cot" along with free healthcare, a G.I. Bill education entitlement, and a guaranteed retirement income stream after as few as 20 years, enlist in the active duty military. On the other hand, if you want a basket of "free goodies" just for having had the good fortune of being born in the U.S., your fellow citizens aren't really that much interested in supporting you in the style to which you'd like to become accustomed.
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Labels are complex. In reality “capitalism” is as dependent on government as would be “socialism”. The real question is the extent to which laws, regulations, and traditions can be engineered (or flouted) to benefit the few at the expense of the many (or vice versa). This can happen under any system no matter whether it is labeled capitalist, socialist, or anything else.
The goal is economic democracy with checks and balances to prevent minorities AND majorities from abusing others. Whether or not anyone thinks our system is currently failing (due to or because of rampant wealth inequality), we all know we can and should do better.
Wrong. Median wages are not the highest; ever. In 1979, that is when they were the highest, when adjusted for inflation. Since then wage disparity grew. Also wrong, while salaries increased 3.5% last year, they are still were, adjusted fro inflation, then they were before the Great Recession.
Capitalism is great when your taxes are cut, you get taxed at capital gains less than most workers, you can hide your money in overseas assets, can deduct losses as a course of business. It is also great when managers, directors and executives make 6 to 7 digital salaries, have stock options and golden parachutes.
For 99% of the population, the "American Dream" has just become that. They dream of hitting the lottery. They watch as their children will end up with a lower standard of living,m then they enjoyed. Many working now, or recent forced out retirees, wonder if they can survive on little or no savings.
Maybe that is why, capitalism has become as much of a dirty word, as socialism. The US version of capitalism is the direct opposite Soviet style socialism. That is the wealth is controlled by a few, the government is overbearing and corrupt, and the masses try to survive the best they can.
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What this argument simply boils down to is the danger of thinking in labels. Hickenlooper and those like him are right: we don’t have a pure capitalist (a la Ayn Rand) system. There are socialist aspects. Calling each other names gets us nowhere. It’s Trumpian.
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I do love it when a Republican like Mr. Stephens lectures Democrats on what they need to do to win an election. If I remember he did this before the mid-terms and I’m sure he was surprised at the result. People running actually listened to what people had to say and if I remember correctly, it was almost overwhelmingly about health care. And what has the President and his party done about health care since then? Nothing. So to set up a straw fight like capitalism vs, socialism misses the point I think...it will still be issues like health care and other bread and butter issues in 2020 that will carry the day
The ward Capitalism means many thing to many people and when Francis Fukuyama wrote “End of History”, Capitalism won the battle between Capitalism and Communism. In early nineteen fifties UN wrote a paper to declare Capitalism is the only economic model, one size fit all for, the whole world and arrogantly called for destruction of old cultures and traditions of the society in the underdeveloped world as these cultures are not friendly to Capitalism. In nineties, at G20 meeting, Germany challenged the Anglo-Saxon model of Capitalism, and forced the organization to accept that there are many version of Capitalism. Recently IMF agreed that each country can use the development model based on market economy suited to its culture and needs. I do not know Bert Stevens is familiar with this history of Capitalism or not, but his arguments look to me to shallow - twenty-first century America’s economic challenge is very different from previous centuries and orthodoxy on the Capitalism is the last thing we need. We need creative Capitalism and if some ideas of socialism can be accommodated in market economy to address modern American economic challenges, so be it. After all the difference between Capitalism and Communism is only a matter of property right, one gives that right to individual, other gives it to state. This binary mode of thinking in modern highly technologically sophisticated society is narrowness of thinking - let the property right be at the most efficient place.
So true, wish when they have Mr. Stephens on some of the talk shows they would actually let him talk. Dems would learn something.
Well why shouldn't Stephens use statistics to make his case? He never mentions the word "inequality". The statistics he trumpets do not touch the 40% of people who do not make a living wage and cannot afford decent housing. They do not touch the declining ranking of the US in terms of education, natal deaths, living standards generally. He did not mention the statistic that real wages are about where they were in 1970 despite great gains in productivity and profits. Stephens never heard about the fact that the 10% at the top of wealth pole own 80 percent of ALL wealth which level is increasing each year.. There is a reason why Mitch McConnell does not want to allow hearings or a vote on House bill 1--he does not want more of those at the bottom of the American capitalism pole to have a vote.
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My gosh, Mr. Stevens and readers. I haven’t seem more violent agreement on an issue in my life.
The foundational roots of capitalism in the United States grew along with cotton in southern soil with the expropriation of native lands, the importation of African slaves, the dislocation of the agricultural economy to create sweatshop factories in the north, all to create wealth for European capitalists that would eventually become the wealth and power of American capitalists to declare themselves an independent nation. Unfettered capitalism brooks no limits to its rapaciousness. It lives by the motto, "Some's good, more's better, and too much is just about enough." Global capitalism is presently destroying the planet with the commodification, over extraction and over consumption of every resource. Capitalism subverts governments and nations and even religions to its purposes with gunboat diplomacy and doctrines of discovery and manifest destiny. Capitalism was NOT the driving force in child labor laws or the 40 hour work week, or in the creation of unemployment insurance or healthcare or Social Security, or in any other social good or common weal in American society. Capitalism is not a force for good, it is merely a force for greed that must be harnessed and shaped by other forces if we meant survive as a nation and as a species on this planet.
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It was easy to be a Capitalist In 1945, we had no competitors, workers returned from war, demand for essentials were high and with that salaries could be high. So Growing economies make capitalism easy because it is not hard on CEO's to give proper salaries. Oddly enough, it is easy for China to have a socialistic system that has the same dynamics, plenty of workers, a growing demand and stiffled competition.
Capitalism does well in periods of growth and high demand, but also eventually leads to two classes, rich and poor. When the demand falls for essentials, Capitalism uses marketing to produce demand for non-essentials and then fluff, and even finds great profits in Medical care. What next? Most biologic systems revert to a "Steady State" or equilibrium. We are rejecting that and rejecting the "Social Contract" that has fed us and leaving too many people behind. As a physician I knew that the mistake was to make assumptions about the diagnosis, eg removing a lung before being sure it was cancer. The diagnosis is still in doubt, Capitalism in its current form is not the whole answer, except for the rich Capitalists.
Mr. Stephens recognizes that "countries like Denmark [are] often mislabeled “socialist.” But he doesn't see that Bernie Sanders' policies are similarly mislabeled. With the possible exception of Medicare for all, not one of Sanders' policy proposals is socialist, which involves government takeover (not merely regulation) of industries. And while we can argue as to whether Sanders wants too much regulation, to imply, as Mr. Stephens does, that Sanders supports centralized planning of any industry is false. In fact, Sen. Sanders and others who call themselves democratic socialists, despite using the word "socialist," are saying exactly what Mr. Stephens wants them to say: "Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans....We need to reform it so it can work for everyone."
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Capitalism is an economic system not a social system- and it's great- if you have capital. What happened to the adage to those who have been given much, much is expected in return. Noblesse oblige?? Shouldn't have to legislate moral responsibility- it never works anyway. See Prohibition.
Discipline is freedom & freedom is responsibility as my old headmistress used to say...
As usual, Bret Stephens has much more to say about the issues he has with Democrats as opposed to Republicans. Republicans are the ones who have largely made this about capitalism vs. socialism. They are the ones who insist that an expanded gov't safety net that more closely resembles those in Western Europe will lead directly to a Venezuelan economy.
Bret has nothing to say about the greed and entitlement of the wealthy as repeatedly demonstrated by our President - such as the ability to repeatedly buy their way out of trouble and pay people to keep quiet, about their disdain for paying taxes, the lack of remorse demonstrated by Wall Street for their role in the recession, about the concerns of respectable economists regarding widening inequality, about people like Fed chairman Paul Volker that we are developing into a plutocracy.
Bret fancies himself a never Trumper, but he is still a Republican enabler. He has nothing to say about the many lies Republicans are willing to countenance in order to protect the President, nothing to say about their denial of global warming evidence, nothing to say about their misrepresentation of the ACA and lies regarding their "better" plans.
Despite the fact that so many Republicans willingly bought into a con, Bret spends more ink trying to get Democrats to appease them than in trying to convince Trump voters why they have gotten it so wrong.
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"The most successful economic system shouldn’t be a dirty word."
And for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
As long as we have a reactionary form of capitalism, be prepared to have it challenged and even overthrown by an electorate that is tired of being played by dishonest politicians, the maximize-shareholder-value crowd, and bad trade deals.
2
I’m really relieved after reading this article. Those lies we were told about stagnation after 2008 and decline of old industrial countries in the North were making me anxious.
So working 90 hours a week is your ideal of a great life? Ask the workers in his company what they think of capitalism. Don't ask the people who are hoarding all the money.
5
Capitalism that is unfettered by a balancing regulation is only "successful" for the few. Otherwise it's a failure in a democratic society and is the reason that other successful countries do not share this view.
The "most successul economic system" is not so successful when it benefits only 1% of the population. Capitalism, at least the robber-baron kind now practiced in our country, has led to the greatest income inequality seen in history. When the top 1% of families make more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99% make, there's bound to be a backlash -- and iot won't be pretty.
4
Interestingly, the President of Denmark recently bristled at and scolded a reporter for referring to Denmark as a socialist country noting that Denmark filly embraces capitalism with safeguards.
2
Spot on!.
I still hope that one reasonable democrat candidate (Biden?) will enter the race late (probably a wise move) and that the young highly vocal wing of the democrat party calms down. Otherwise 4 more years of Trump.
1
For whatever reason since I was a young, young man, I always and still more than ever thought capitalism freed the individual. Cuba, the Soviets ruined their nations and their citizens lives. In a sense put them in a near concentration camp of daily hell. The problem is now a bit of greed . C'mon guys, your family does not need 250 million dollars in the bank, it will only screw your kids up in the long run. It does not insure their future, it ruins it, just good for the goldiggers.
1
Hickenlooper was painfully unprepared, and just could not get in front of this question.
The right response was "Yes, I am a capitalist, and so is everyone else. What is being called Socialism by the Right wing is simply common sense, and that includes Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare."
4
Stephens left out the statistics that paint a different picture.
We have has significant job growth. But it's shallow. We lost millions of high paying union jobs averaging higher than the national medium and replaced them with gig economy jobs around $32,000 a year.
The 3.4% wage growth is good, but even at this rate it will take decades to make up for 35 years of wage stagnation.
Stephen's like many conservatives claim capitalism is doing great. And it is for the top 10% of the income bracket. The other 90% are struggling and many are loosing that struggle.
We have a 20 trillion dollar a year economy and underpaid teachers, a crumbling infrastructure, a 20th century internet as other nations rush past us. A third of our water systems are as bad as Flint Michigan, maybe worse.
The tremendous wealth of our nation is being produced by the many, but it's mostly going into the hands of the few. We have the greatest level of inequality since the 1880's.
Stephens knows the "new socialists" have no intention to changing the entire system. But by creating the 'either or' straw man he is simply covering for the ruling elite who have always paid very well for precisely that type of obfuscation.
Real economic reform will cut into both the wealth accumulation and income of the 1%. Real reform will flatten some of this grotesque inequality.
But Stephens wants fake reform like Horatio Alger business stories and that's what plays into the hands of Donald Trump.
4
In the name of Capitalism our tax system has become Socialism for the investor class.
The earned income of an invested dollar should be taxed like any other earned income... but it is not. It is sheltered by lower rates than a working man's salary. If an investment produces a loss, that loss can shelter an equivalent gain, making that gain not taxable at all! There is no such protection for the common working man.
1
The economics that you esteem worked well enough in America until the wage market left for China.
That was the tipping point where companies that had been profitable and sustaining jobs were suddenly nothing more than chess pieces to be moved around on a global board regardless of the livliehoods being trashed.
It is apparent that the free market with its virtues of growth and scale has failed America and must be reined in. Call it socialism if you like, but we demand to return to a decent life of affordable healthcare, education, clean air, water and food and the human dignity afforded other developed countries.
2
The ones screaming "Socialism! Socialism!" the loudest are Republicans trying to tie the ghost of V.I. Lenin to any collective, (i.e. government) initiatives that benefit everyone.
Capitalism, by itself, does not distribute wealth equitably. Socialism, by itself, does not create wealth.
It's yin AND yang that works, not yin OR yang.
2
The moderate Democrats need to speak up to counter the the silly talk of the “Democratic Socialists”.
Whether it be Ocasio-Cortez or Omar or Warren or Harris they need to be held to the fscts and reality.
The majority of Americans don’t approve of the current President but if the Democrats don’t choose a candidate who represents a wide base there will be a repeat of the last election.
2
Capitalism makes its own opponents. As long as its proponents fail to understand that and present themselves as nothing but Shkrelis writ small, you will always find opposition among the more humane.
2
Capitalism, like socialism is a narrow world view that is deeply flawed. Capitalism is NOT free enterprise. Free enterprise represents a level playing field where each individual, protected by a strong regulatory government can compete on an equal basis with larger and wealthier entities. Free enterprise only works in a robust democracy that protects its citizens from more powerful organizations such as the KKK, religious groups, Amazon, or other huge domestic corporations and foreign entities such as Russian oligarchs. Unfortunately the USA has become, under the GOP, a government that is no longer run by its own people but instead by huge corporate entities both here and abroad that have become a modern aristocracy of political and economic power. Mr. Stephens is dead wrong when he claims that the median household income is larger than it has ever been. That ignores both inflation and the need for both the husband and the wife to work today in order to survive.
The most egregious thing that Mr. Stephan’s ignores is what the GOP has done to our Constitution and our democratic form of government. Under the GOP and its aristocracy of donors, our republic including its Senate, until recently its House of Representatives, and its Supreme Court have become lap dogs for gangsters, foreign oligarchs, money launderers and political tyrants. Obama's robust economy will not stand up much longer under the naked greed of these powerful thieves.
5
Why can’t there be a balance to both systems - capitalism without a winner take all and socialism that meets the needs of people without taking over responsibility for their lives?
I recommend Roger Cohen's column in today's Times, "Socialism and the 2020 American Election". Perhaps here is the "balance" many Americans are looking for. Looks pretty good to me as well. 2.2 cheers for capitalism!
This is the key statement “To prevail, a moderate Democrat will need to behave likewise. The message can go like this: Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone.” Are reforms the Trump tax rollback on wealthy individuals? Are they incentive and tax policy designed to lower or eliminate our carbon output? Are they policy designed to support universal health care and low cost education? It is so easy to label policies as socialist or capitalist. Are the tax breaks and incentives to the oil industry socialist? How about those that Amazon wanted in Queens? How about laws protecting the rights to for unionization? Democrats are proposing ideas and Republicans offer labels. I would rather go with ideas that can be debated and actioned.
1
We haven't "reformed" capitalism in 50 years except to make it better for a very few and much worse for the masses.
3
Not Stephens’s best work. Embracing capitalism ought to be like embracing air; of course we can’t survive under any other system. But more & more the world we inhabit is is losing all vestiges of gray in favor of black & white. The words “capitialism” & “socialism” have come to signify the worst attributes of those systems- “socialism” represents Venezuelan deprivation and “capitalism” rampant exploitation. To align oneself with either word, as Hickenlooper understands, is to risk association with those unfortunate connotations. And I fear Stephens has fallen prey to the tyranny of the “black or white”; a congresswoman utters a two-dozen word ambiguous sentence, & Stephens brands her anitsemitic. A man who makes his living by using words, as Stephens does, should understand and do more to fight this kind of dog-whistling.
3
Bret is right on target about this: candidates who must tie themselves in knots to avoid saying things that will set off the leftist base on twitter are unlikely to be successful. Hickenlooper failed miserably in his first test.
This issue is purely semantic. You need to define both socialism and capitalism before you make such proclamations. I think people like Hickenlooper are wise not to wade into this argument without solid definitions. Twitter feeds pass for news these days, and a nuanced discussion of socialism or capitalism requires more that a sentence or two.
Unrestrained capitalism is awful. Right now, income disparity is a serious problem. The richest people appear to be the most morally corrupt. Our society doesn't reward justice and goodness, it rewards greed, dishonesty, and scams. If that passes for capitalism, count me out. But that is not an honest definition of capitalism. It's a straw man definition. Same thing goes for socialism. These words are virtually meaningless without nuanced context. Our military and police force are socialist institutions. Congress is a socialist institution for that matter. Flinging these terms around carelessly is irresponsible.
You do everybody a disservice by playing this game.
2
What is it with the conservative columnists in these pages that compels them to dispense advice to the Democratic Party and Democratic voters? The voters spoke in the midterms. People are fed up, and I don't think Stephens has any idea just how fed up. So fed up, in fact, that some voters are just fine with the "socialist" label, which used to be a use-fire recipe for losing any election. Some are so fed up that they voted for Trump in 2016 just to register their fed-upness with the status quo, which the thieving Trump promised to blow up. Fix your own party, Bret Stephens.
Capitalism Socialism Communism you can't get the average citizen to give you a definition of any. The fact is that each of them offers better governance at some level. All governments are corrupt by their very nature. Utilizing strict pronunciation of each doctrine is used by political adversaries to divide. We need to educate or investigate the things each doctrine provide for a more stable life.
Bret,
You lead us into a foggy world of words that mean something different to everyone. Word demonization is only effective when words retain a single meaning.
Millenials are not interested in your defense of capitalism. They would ask if the capitalist system you describe is fair to their generation saddled with enormous college debt, impossibly high housing costs, disloyal employers who treat them as disposable, and a healthcare system that is designed for profiteering not health. And they are not interested in the demonizing of candidates because they utter the word social...ism.
Most of us applaud a world of choices and free enterprise. We would like that enterprise to be competitive but also socially responsible. We would like a society - aka government - that helps us with human services. And yet we burden companies with the escalating costs of healthcare - we cripple the companies as they compete globally.
Capitalism with restraints is indeed the engine we need. But socialism for health, education and infrastructure are just common sense. Profits for products and for many services, yes. Socialism for a healthy well educated population, yes as well.
As to the 2020 race? We'll settle for someone we can trust. Someone who does not lie daily. Someone who treats others with respect. Someone who reads. Someone who can use a computer. Someone who understands how to surround himself with people who are smarter than they are. Experts, not lackeys.
5
Actually the American Economy is not working for millions, and the problem is that those for whom the economy is not working, are millions and millions more than those for whom it is working. All those cheery numbers don't amount to a hill of beans when the numbers in poverty are reflected in a lower life expectancy, increased suicide, drug addiction and all of the other social ills associated with poverty and a lack of hope for a better life. It's for just these reasons that Hick as we call him here can never win the nomination.
Great guy, even tempered, I used to listen to him every week as he made himself available to public radio in the morning. He lost half our legislature over a token gun control measure that even he didn't believe in when recorded behind closed doors. Hick represents the 9.9%, for that reason he is anathema to the working class, and as Hillary found out, we are ascendant.
"...not working for millions...". Bill Maher, a guy I generally dislike, nailed your observation. When people ask why the economy isn't working for them, the answer is, "Because it wasn't designed to."
A few years ago I'd agree that saying you are against capitalism and for socialism would be political suicide in the US. Today I'm not so sure. Americans are increasingly frustrated with our entire system. The election of Trump is a symptom of that frustration. The election of a proud socialist in 2020 might be another. Moderates and centrists believe that the system is basically good and that all it needs are some tweaks to make it even better. That has long been what most Americans believe. But do they believe it today? I'm not sure. We may be reaching a point where Americans feel the whole system must be destroyed and rebuilt. That's certainly what Trump voters felt. It's certainly what Bernie and AOC supporters feel. Radicalism may be exactly what we want . . . and also maybe exactly what we need.
1
Socialism is not central planning. Socialism says that people's actions in the economic arena must be subject to laws. Governments exist to protect people from the "animal instincts" that Mitt Romney bragged about. We don't let dogs run wild in our neighborhoods for instance. Socialism is also the laws that protect businesses from the predatory practices of those "wild animals.".
1
Classical, authentic Western Catholic thought opposes both capitalism and socialism. While both can have positive elements, their overall worldviews are erroneous, and have caused much suffering to many people. Anything that diverts our economic activity from its proper subordinate role in service toward our natural and supernatural ends is going to fuel very real problems and injustices.
Leaving aside the British capitalist-driven historical horrors in Britain, Ireland, and India, our own recent US history shows similar defects at work. Being able to charge what you want, pay employees as little as you can get away with, and create Rube Goldberg-like financial instruments for short-term money-grubbing profits enabled such folks to bring the entire economy crashing down 10 years ago. And then, the capitalist backup plan of 'socialism for me, capitalism for thee' kicked in with corporate bailouts.
We 'reform' it by moving to a true distributism economic model.
Well done, Stephens, for pointing out that the socialist tag is often wrongly applied to Denmark--as it is to much of northern Europe. Real dialogue is impossible when words mean anything a propaganda machine finds useful from day to day. When I first came to America, I had a knowledge of European politics, and had some understanding of terms like capitalist, conservative, workers' party, socialism, liberal and libertarian. Then I find the word liberal in America is an insult; socialist is a tag embraced by old duffers who've been in Congress for a quarter century and have never done anything... This ignorance suits the real rulers of America.
1
Capitalism works quite well IF people play by the rules. And I’m not just talking about “legal” rules, but also the rules designed to make the system work. Let me give one example:
The now much maligned “trickle down economics” is actually a very good and plausible idea. The only problem is, the money NEVER seems to “trickle down!” We all know the idea that money “trickling down” down to workers, etc gets put into the general economy through more purchase of new clothes, cars, vacations, restaurant visits so on and so forth. It can even lift the business that did the trickling down under the axiom that a rising (economic) tide lifts all ships!! Good for one and all.
Ah... but the “me and mine” greedy set, beholding to Wall St quarterly estimates won’t let the money trickle when they can buy back gobs of stock and keep the stock price up and also provide for golden parachutes and unheard of person compensation.
Not at all the intention of trickle down economics. Play by the rules...and capitalism works just fine. By the way, socialism doesn’t work so well either if the “rules” are broken there too. And it happens plenty!
1
"The most successful economic system shouldn’t be a dirty word."
Conservatives have made it so, by insisting that the only person who can claim to be a capitalist is a laissez faire, greed is good, no holds barred, winner take all capitalist. Anything else is Socialist for Conservatives.
It is a shame, but no wonder to me, that a huge fraction of the 20 something generation wants to reject capitalism. It's because Conservatives allow no room for management. RINO, Chaffee...
So the fate of the Democratic presidential race depends on how Hickenlooper bumbles an answer? Democrats (and Democratic leaning Independents) are waiting and watching, and contrary to Stephens's analysis, they will choose the candidate with the best chance of winning, not the one who most closely follows Sanders et al -- much as they may like what the Social Democrats are saying. But what will win is decency, honor, respect, and the ability to get things done. We are all sick of its antithesis currently running amok. And by the, Republicans shouldn't feel so sure that a "strong economy" will bail them out. Whose economy -- the .1% or the rest of us?
Stephens and others endlessly parse the word "socialism" and the phrase "democratic socialism." Not any of the Democrats really propose socialism, where the central state controls production. We don't do much production anyway.
But the real issue in American economics is the myth that capitalism is actually our economic system. Financial manipulation, aided and abetted by lobbyists and lack of real competition is our "economic system." Profit-taking, branding, sleight of hand accounting and mergers and acquisitions are the dominant tactics of our system.
Capitalism, in a purer form, is - as the quip suggests - the worst system other than everything else. But when it is corrupted and controlled by oligarchs and politicians who game the system, inhibit the free flow of capital, advantage some players over others and generally smother the intended mechanisms, we have something other than capitalism at work.
Our economic system is more cronyism than capitalism, and that needs to be part of the discussion.
1
Why can't we allow our politicians to be nuanced?
Capitalism in it's pure, most "libertarian" form (pursuit of profits, private ownership, open markets) is nothing but a "mechanism" that motivates stable, thriving and innovative societies. Humans have engaged in it for 1000's of years and since Adam Smith we've viewed it scientifically.
But economic systems are just a spectrum of "tricks" that only work when regulations proscribe those pursuits, ownership rights, and markets. As a result modern capitalism can more or less look socialist depending on the amount of regulation and ownership rights a country chooses to embrace. Conservatives tend to choose more freedom (for some sectors) with a trust in Smith's invisible hand and liberals tend to mistrust too much freedom for pursuit of self-interest.
I can't imagine that, Bret, you are a purist that accepts only entirely free, open markets in every sector. Health care being a notable example of where libertarian capitalism is clearly not possible. Being a "proud capitalist" is therefore nothing but bait that's being used to get a sound bite, a quote that will be misused by opponents (as is now being done).
Hickenlooper might have mishandled (but not by much) the interaction with Scarborough, but he was more right than you seem to be.
2
"and distribute each far more widely — than any form of central planning." Best straw man argument of the day. No one is calling for central planning, and Mr. Stephens knows it.
1
It is true that "Capitalism hasn't failed the masses."
What has failed the masses is democracy.
What we have become is a plutocracy - thanks to conservatives, the GOP, and the likes of Bret Stephens.
Capitalism enabled Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos to work hard and make successful businesses.
But collectively they have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the US population, or 160 million people. How did that happen?
Tax policy, trade policy, labor policy, environmental policy, health care policy, and especially campaign finance laws such as Citizens United has enabled the 1% and corporations to govern at the expense of the masses.
2
I wouldn't argue the notion that capitalism is an effective means for competing in the world market, but the trouble with our current state of capitalism in the U.S. is that the spoils go to an ever-deceasing minority, the wealthy and the super wealthy, a fact no hint of which is mentioned in Stephens' article. That in itself might not be so bad, but the ascent of wealth is accompanied by, indeed fueled by, ever-decreasing income to the 99%.
1
Two worthwhile takeaways from this column: 1) yes, it's better to be a Sanders type--unwavering in your consistent convictions, than to be a Hickenlooper trying to please everybody by not saying the wrong thing, and, 2) wow, another conservative pundit understands that Denmark is not a socialist country.
The rest of this column? If forty years of supply side voodoo economics culminating in Donald Trump hasn't taught Stephens that America's brand of capitalism has failed everyone but the upper class, then he just doesn't get it and never will.
4
@CF, many people like Bret only see black and white. They do not see things in a scale. They only see, "either" "or". So either you are for capitalism or you are not for socialism. Nothing in between. Life does NOT happen that way. Our brains are designed to process complex options and we are terribly fortunate in this country to be able to exercise complex options. We are grateful for that.
1
Extreme Socialism AND Capitalism both are wrong for ALL societies. By most measures, the US has moved from Capitalism to it's extreme version in the last 35 years. Most Americans have slipped backward while the few have made huge fortunes. The real condition and experience of ordinary Americans in our society is one of struggle and uncertainty. The often used kitchen table discussions and later the anxiety away the table are about health care, college costs, housing and extra jobs is a world away from what Mr. Stephens and Republicans see. For their efforts and on their backs, Americans rightfully expect better opportunity and reward. The people are asking now, and in 2020 they will demand it by their vote. Republicans can call this socialism, but Americans call it fairness and decency expected in a democratic society Of the People, By the People, For the People.
1
Bret Stephens. Color him a Judge T.S. Ellis III capitalist.
As long as unregulated capitalism serves the wealthy and white-collar crime is unpunished Mr. Stephens and his Republican Party will attack anyone who questions how well capitalism serves the working class.
Why can we conflate unregulated capitalism with white-collar crime, Bret Stephens and the Republican Party?
Mr. Stephens may disapprove of Trump but he supports the Republican Party which commits white-collar crimes (voter suppression, voter intimidation, voter roll purges, voter-registration restrictions and hurdles, gerrymandering) to gain and retain power so they can make laws that serve the wealthy in their unregulated capitalist thievery of the working class.
Whether it's Paul Manafort defrauding banks and defrauding taxpayers by not paying his lawful share of taxes; or whether it's a CEO who drives up his salary by taking the Republican tax giveaway to the wealthy to buy back and manipulate up a corporation's stock; or whether it's a Republican governor purging voter rolls to stay in office; all of these are white-collar crimes which are celebrated by those who celebrate unregulated capitalism.
If he could've, Judge T.S. Ellis III would've given Manafort a medal instead of a token sentence. Ellis admired Manafort's practice of Republican unregulated capitalism - steal,lie, if you get caught you get a slap on the wrist. Republican style unregulated capitalism is pure theft from the working class.
3
I’m as pro-capitalism as anyone. It’s the best system humans have found to drive innovation, industriousness, and ultimately greater prosperity for greater numbers. The critical levers though in recognizing that even the best system has its flaws are assuring clean air and water through regulation, reining in greed through financial oversight —a natural byproduct of capitalism, and recognizing that certain businesses like healthcare do NOT work well in free-market systems. Just because a few specific businesses or sectors are better handled another way does not mean we’re suddenly socialist as a country.
No question capitalism has driven the expansion of wealth on a global scale and brought a better economic standard of living to the world's majority.
While this is good, it is only one measure of the quality of life. Capitalism has also had negative effects: colonialism, imperialism, wars of mass slaughter and now neocolonialism and neoliberal austerity.
To be fair, Stephens only addresses the situation in the U.S. So are we in a paradise? Not if we look at social inequities, in themselves a source of social ill. Not if we look at social justice. Not if we look at capitalism's bringing people to give up on life and destroy themselves; death from suicide and drugs has leapt to an all-time high. Society in the US is comparatively pathological.
Economic wealth is certainly necessary for people to live, to be economically functional and reproduce. But this refers only to the biological existence shared by all animals. Are we not more than just biological organisms? Economic wealth is only a precondition of a distinctively human life---known in traditional terms as our "species being".
Human dignity does not reduce to economic well-being or mere biological survival. Social mutuality enables us to transcend circumstances inherited from the past and what we once were; we transcend ourselves. Dignity does not depend on having advantage over others or merely having esteem in their eyes. It arises from a joint struggle with them that transcends the past.
Like "capitalism" "democratic socialism" also shouldn't be used called a "dirty" concept as it was by President Trump in his most recent State of the Union speech. Capitalism represents Big Business and like our tripartite Constitutional government must rely on "checks and balances" to work for all in a democracy. Unfortunately, the historic balance of forces between Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor have failed as unlimited capitalist money has literally bought politicians and forged an alliance against Big Labor. The result has been tax cuts for the wealthy capitalists opposed by the vast majority of Americans, vast income inequality not seen since the age of the Robber Barons (another "dirty" name for capitalists of the late 19th century), stagnant wages for workers who have found their attempts to form unions and bargain collectively blocked at both the state and federal level. This is why capitalism as Marx warned has become a dirty word. We don't need, as Marx thought a new socialist system, we just need to restore the historic balance that the union movement created and that democratic socialism is striving to correct. If not, the social and economic imbalance and unrest that now exists will only worsen.
1
America is already a "socialist" country. The federal government now takes almost a trillion dollars a year in tax income and redistributes it to military contractors who produce goods that are rarely used, often don't work, and no one wants. Thousands of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, missile interceptors that miss, fighter jets plagued with problems, military housing maintained by private contractors reeking with black mold --- the list is endless. I will take anti-socialists like Bret here seriously when they start decrying the perverted socialism that is our military-industrial complex.
Ours is a socialism of death. What the democratic socialists want is a socialism of life. The moral contrast could not be greater. As for the economy, a country where no one fears loss of health insurance, where young parents can afford both childcare and a job, where anyone who wants can get a good education, where people have time to live like human beings and not automatons in in a system that demands 60-hour work weeks, is a country that does what an economy is fundamentally supposed to do: increase not "wealth" endlessly and mindlessly but happiness.
Recent studies show that older people tend to be the happiest. Retired, older people have finally escaped the endless demands of our work fetishizing culture; thanks to Social Security, they enjoy a guaranteed minimum income; Medicare means they will never lack health insurance. What does that sounds like?
1
The first time I heard the term "capitalism" was in a second-rate spy movie, where the Russian spies said the US was a "capitalist" country. I was a kid then, and I got the impression that it was an insult. Certainly few businessmen or politicians used the word.
Our economic system is a blend of capitalism and socialism. Those who insist on only capitalism are few and very radical. Without elements of government regulation and involvement we soon would fall back into ruthless treatment of labor, women, children and minorities. We of course need those who have ideas and ambition to build enterprises also. The press and commentators keep presenting the choice as either or when in fact the question is one of balance and judgment. The line of questioning by Morning Joe was woefully absurd.
Taming the horse perfectly describes what Elizabeth Warren sought to do in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Who in their right mind can dispute that the payday loan “industry”, with its triple digit interest rates designed to entrap debtors, is anything other than the poster child of unbridled capitalism? From my many years as a consumer protection lawyer attending conferences where Warren spoke with clarity and common sense about a rigged system, I can tell you that her complaint is not with capitalism, but with the forces that would destroy it by rigging it in their favor. She keenly appreciates the distinction between capitalism and unbridled greed. So did FDR, by the way. Too bad Sen. Clinton did not, when she backed the credit card companies’ Bankruptcy Deform Act, thus confirming working folks’ disillusionment with the Democratic Party.
4
@Dale Irwin
I wouldn't trust any man who wishes to be "bridled" and wants to bridle other men as well. There's a name for that. It's called slavery.
"We worked 70, 80, 90 hours a week to build the business." Yes, that's capitalism. It's also capitalism where workers have so little share in an economy's prosperity that they must take on two and three jobs, working 70, 80, 90 hours a week just to make ends meet, with nothing to show for it in the end. The staggering inequality in America today does not arise from a difference between those who work hard and those who don't. Enough of the disingenuous propaganda. Hickenlooper may have been squirming and evasive. But "Capitalist running dogs" like Mr Stephens are hiding too. They are hiding what they are defending.
2
"We need to reform [capitalism] so it can work for everyone."
Why is this even an issue? Because rather than reforming capitalism, or even analyzing it, the Republicans and the rich have just feasted on it. As a result, Democrats are casting about for solutions - any solutions to the mess Republicans have made of our prosperity. Yes, reformed capitalism is the way forward. Inclusive capitalism, equitable capitalism, capitalism with a smiling face. But not Republican capitalism. That has failed miserably and it alone is why "socialism" is whispering in the ears of Democrats.
1
Not a single mention of the environment or global warming in this entire piece. Like most folks over 30, Brett remains in denial about the biggest existential crisis facing the human race in its history. And as some wise man once said, you’re not going to solve this problem with the same consciousness that created it. It will require a new consciousness, one founded in “care and repair” not “gig and dig” as Naomi Klein puts it. And that consciousness is not capitalism, founded on greed and human only thinking. Time to move on.
1
None of the WORDS themselves are bad or the idea behind them. But in practice they have not performed as advertised.
So much nonsense in one column.
Look, most of the world's most successful economies are capitalist/socialism hybrids. Period.
But in the US, it seems the very wealthy want socialism for themselves and capitalism for everyone else. We can use the example of the 2008 financial meltdown, where bankers suffered very little for their errors and many lower on the economic scale paid for their sins.
Or let's look at a current example. A retail chain whose stock has fallen to well below $1/share. Have any of the top executives lost their jobs? Of course not. They're all collecting fat salaries and even bonuses for performance that is, to be generous, subpar. It will be the rank and file employees who will suffer for the incompetence of those senior executives. And this example is but one of many.
Capitalism is becoming a dirty word because those at the very top are making it so by practicing socialism for themselves. No consequences for poor performance.
3
Everyone should read Adam Smith to see how market capitalism transforms greed into benevolence when a very specific set of economic conditions is satisfied. However, when those fairly strict conditions (perfectly competitive markets absent market failures) don't hold, there is a possibility for dishonest, predatory, or socially harmful behavior by capitalists. As a consequence, we need the rule of law and effective regulation. Democrats generally forget the first half of what Adam Smith said about the invisible hand and Republicans mostly forget the second half. We must understand both aspects of market capitalism to harness it to society's needs, rather than allowing blind ideology to run too far in either direction.
1
Actions have equal and opposite reactions, Mr. Stephens.
When one group makes capitalism toxic, celebrating the unfettered free market with religious fervor; dismantling the regulatory checks and balances that make the system work in favor of society rather than in favor of a few amassing as much wealth as possible, capitalism becomes a dirty word. Because robber barons made it toxic.
We can't speak of capitalism because we've redefined the term to mean the kind of system that supports a banana republic. That redefinition is not the Democrats fault.
What leftists want is a system with a safety nets for all with a guarantee of action that protects people by protecting the planet in the long run; what centrists want is a system that goes back to protecting the environment; allowing for profit without profiteering and managing consumer protection from rapacious businesses meant to milk people like aphids in an ant hill.
Neither of these philosophies is as radical as the philosophy of taking all one can in the very short term, devil take the hindmost. And *THAT* is the closest operating definition of what the current GOP idea of "capitalism" stands for that I can come up with.
That is the definition that people like Hickenlooper can't afford to support. Redefine capitalism to what it meant 20 or 30 years ago, Mr. Stephens -say back in the day of Bush pere - and you'd have a lot of support for it.
1
Agreed.
The far leftists and socialists are handing the election to Trump on a platter.
The data are clear: Sanders' effect on the last election was sufficient to give the Presidency to Trump. But will the socialists learn?
No. They will just do it again, and are.
1
@Dan
"The data are clear: Sanders' effect on the last election was sufficient to give the Presidency to Trump."
You can't plausibly support that claim. But, please, won't you give a try? Breathless...
1
dear bret
labelling complicated and ill defined concepts, like “capitalism” , does not do justice for better understanding.
if capitalism is defined as an economic sysytem where capital rules, that concept is oudated. today it is imagination, creativity and innovation that rules. if it is unrestricted unreulated and open market, then that is not the case in any country. if it is free competition then that is not true as well unless one thinks as monopolies or oligopolies as free competition. we have seen how major and rich corporations are subsidized and major losses are sociliaized as the recent financial crises showed.
the problem is that even as you made a good attempt at defining better qualities of “capitaism” the term is abused by many to promote the worst aspects of “ capitalism”. i think people have become more aware of those aspects and now want a more fair and caring system that promotes less humongous inequality.
communism and socialism have been used interchangeably, a gross error but useful during the cold war.
any system that does not place the well being of humans at the center of its thinking and concern is bound to be discared over the next half a century.
better to start now.
Bret misses the point about capitalism (as usual). Of course the people who benefit from capitalism love it. The private equity and hedge fund billionaires think it’s great. But looking a macro numbers can be deceiving. The real question is: What percentage of our population currently finds that capitalism not working in its current form?
It is not a choice between capitalism or no capitalism. The question is whether we make common sense reforms to take some of the winner-takes-all aspects out of capitalism, so more people can benefit from the system. Surely Bret would understand that a republic where 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth is not sustainable long term. That is what some of the Democratic candidates are attempting to open a debate about.
And, frankly, we should have a conversation about what Amazon is doing to our economy and way of life, and how they went about doing it. Antitrust laws say pricing your products below cost to drive out your competitors so you can then raise prices later, is illegal. Yet Amazon did this with books and continues to do this again and again. Why shouldn’t we talk about that?
Bret also seems to forget that in 2008, the unbridled practitioners of capitalism on Wall Street and in our banking system almost destroyed the economy. The taxpayers bailed them out. So the taxpayers should have the biggest say in how much, or how little, capitalism they’d like to enjoy.
4
There is no other viable economic system other than Capitalism, that debate has been completed and decided. The one point that seems to elude free market capitalist is that it is only an economic system, it is not in fact a system of governance.
Democracy is our chosen system of governance and it is being controlled and hindered by the economic system. We have been improving and discussing our economic system since Ronald Reagan. Its time we work on our American Humanity, instead of just our American pocketbook.
1
"One of the reasons why the right-wing charge of 'socialism' against the Democratic Party rarely stuck was that it was generally untrue. To smooth the edges of capitalism, even to save it from itself, doesn’t mean to disdain and disavow it. There’s a difference between taming a horse and shooting it."
Spot on. Now, if you and the GOP will stop foaming at the mouth, you will realize that this is just the project that Teddy Roosevelt started and his cousin Franklin finished. Every Democratic candidate for President is in this mold, but some (the moderates) are more cautious about describing it. Even Bernie is not a socialist. Oh he likes the word, but he is first and foremost an FDR Democrat with a bridle in his hand. And like with FDR, the GOP will photo-shop out the bridle, replace it with a gun, and say "they are taking aim at your horse, America." And this Democratic foaming at the mouth about socialism is only feeding the frenzy. Democratic Party candidates need to stay on message: yes, capitalism is the engine of our prosperity, but just now that engine needs a tune-up so all the cylinders are firing properly.
1
Thus far, I have not heard a single Democrat Presidential Candidate advocate for government control of the means of production. Nor have I heard a Democrat Candidate advocate for social control of the means of production.
What I have heard is that they wish to establish government policies that ensure a fair deal for all.
Mr. Stephens should get out more. Talk to folks in households with 2 parents and 4 jobs. No healthcare. No chance to further educational opportunities for their children. And on......and on.... These folk are not hard to find. They just don’t live in the same neighborhoods as Mr. Stephens. These folks didn’t attend the same Massachusetts boarding school as Mr. Stephens. Their parents couldn’t afford to pay for tuition at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics where Mr. Stephens obtained his prestigious academic credentials.
Intellectual dishonesty? No. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He just doesn’t know anyone outside his socio-economic strata.
In this heated discussion about socialism the Gini Index of income/wealth distribution might be helpful. The latest data (2014) according to Wikipedia shows the Nordic countries, Germany, Austria, Japan in the leading - least inequal - category, followed by France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, Australia ranking second, then UK, Italy, Portugal third, and the US in the fourth ranking position. Only countries with comparable social, economic and financial structures are shown here.
Conservative leaning, I still consider the term „social“ positive as in „social market economy“ introduced by a CONSERVATIVE economics minister and later chancellor in the fifties/sixties. High quality and generally affordable services in the health and education sector as well as decent wages balance any society and reduce violence. Is it a coincidence that statistics on numbers of prison inmates, gun related fatalities, existence of gated residential communities seem to correlate with the above mentioned index?
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A capitalist society is great if you happen to be one on the plutocrats, otherwise not so much. In our capitalist society a handful of wealthy individuals control as much wealth as half the rest of the country combined. It's easy to go bankrupt if ones suffers a serious illness or tries to get a college education. The social democracies of countries like those of Europe provide individual freedom from such debilitating situations. Mr. Stephens has bought into the Republican line that any form of socialism is evil. He should keep in mind that the goal of the Republican Party is protection of the plutocrats. That's where they get their money.
Everyone keeps saying the economy is sound and citing the same pointless out of context statistics. This article does it as well.
Unemployment at 3.4% sounds great until you realize the growth was mostly in low wage jobs. Folks working 2 or 3 low wage jobs to survive will tend to lower the unemployment rate after all.
Wage growth of 3.4% is meaningless because it’s not inflation adjusted. Noting median wage growth is just another reference to the same thing. That is just citing one statistic twice in different ways to make it sound like more evidence than it is.
Yes, we have had some real wage growth but it’s more like 1% when you adjust for how much more things cost to buy - you know - inflation.
That said, this can probably be mostly attributed to regulatory changes in large blue states that now have $12-$15 minimum wages. It’s a good thing we move the bottom up by the way, but it didn’t help the middle 80% at all. An increase of 1% real wages against the increase to mortgage rates of 2% during the same time period means the middle class is losing ground - not gaining.
If I didn’t know any better I would swear there is a plot by Rich folks to tell half truths that justify economic policy designed to siphon wealth out of the bottom 99%. Oh wait ...there is - It’s called trickle down economics and it’s half-truth dependent version of capitalism is being peddled by Republicans in plain sight in articles like this one.
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The answer is easy: There's plenty of capitalism in socialism, otherwise how can China be the number 2 economy in the world and our number1 competitor? There's all kinds of capitalism, it's just that we've adopted the cruelest form. Capitalist tend to see the organizing principles of a society as the maintenance of capital, where socialist see it as the maintenace of the social well-being of its members. Canada, Denmark, and Germany have thriving capitalists within societies organized around a hieghtened respect for the social well being of its members.
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Funny how Trump was elected on the theme of "shaking things up" in Washington. Nowadays it's "if only the Dems would stop saying they were going to shake things up, everything would be fine". The new campaign cry: "status quo forever!".
It's scare-mongering like Stephens did here that will lose it for the Dems, if they don't get their heads on straight. Polls show that a clear majority are in favor of the policies that Stephens decries. For some reason (mainly money in politics) the Legislature is not following what people want, and instead demonizes those proposals. And somehow, they're getting away with it.
The Dems must find a candidate who can clearly explain and unashamedly defend the policies that the majority wants. That's how they'll win. And I don't hear that yet.
The freshman Democratic caucus and old guard of Warren and Sanders are pushing the party to disavow capitalism. While this may work in specific districts, as a whole, American's identity is in part capitalism and entrepreneurship. Can our economic system be fairer - "yes." But a wholesale repudiation of the capitalist system could spell big problems for the Democrats in 2020. I believe it started with the evisceration by the Democrats of a good man, Mitt Romney, in 2012, and has continued spiraling from there.
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The Green New Deal wasn't socialism, it was Marxism. A committee making decisions about what will be produced, how people travel, and what we consume was identical to a Politburo 5-year plan.
The Politburo would decide the economy would produce 5000 more tractors whether anyone wanted tractors or not. The people wanted washing machines so they wouldn't spend all day washing their clothes. But no one listened and more importantly no one cared because the idea that people who didn't have to wash their clothes could go out and enjoy themselves and thereby create jobs didn't matter. Does the convenience, liberty, and economic engine of commercial air travel matter to the "socialists"? It doesn't appear that it does.
Gillum lost in Florida because retirees who moved to Florida just so they wouldn't have to pay state income tax were not going to vote for a state income tax. He dragged Senator Nelson down with him. According to the WSJ, 9 "progressives" ran in purple districts and all 9 lost. The Bronx sent a socialist to Congress-big deal. There have been socialists in Congress since 1920, only now they are exclusively given the microphone.
200 million Americans with private insurance don't want Medicare with its waits, lack of mental health and dental coverage, and yes...there will be rationing. There's no other way to pay for rising medical care with government allocated money.
I despise Trump but I'll vote for him unless the Democrats nominate someone reasonable.
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"..unemployment is at 3.8percent, wage growth at 3.4 percent, is at a 10 year high. Median household income is as high as its ever been." Compared to what?
Productiivity is higher than it has ever been, yet if minimum wages had kept pace with income growth within our economy since the 1980's, they would be well over $20 an hour.
Based on 2017 Census Bureau statistics, more than 12.3 percent of Americans lived in poverty. That little percentage number represents over 40 million people. Let that really sink in, 40 million people living in poverty in this fantastic economy. In what universe do we, as supposed moral human beings, find this acceptable?
Time for a big dose of socialism.
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Whenever I read your columns, I feel as though you are forgetting America’s history. For better or for worse, as long as our robber barons (or, captains of industry, as I’m sure you’d prefer to call them) have been crowing about the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism, the government has been subsidizing their efforts, from land grants to build the transcontinental railroads to business-friendly laws that enabled them to profit obscenely while they exploited the work of women, children, and immigrants, who worked 60 hour weeks in dangerous conditions that left their lungs blackened and backs hunched over, many suffering permanent disfigurement and/or premature death.
And you forget to mention that, in years past as well as today, capitalism’s “successes” are made possible by the exploitation and degradation of the environment. Yet where are the corporations who are rising up, absent any regulations, to meet the challenges posed by rapid climate change? It seems to me that they are still feasting at the trough without any thought of a sustainable future.
Socialism is not the bogeyman. In this country there has been a mix of “capitalist” and “socialist” policies throughout our history and we would do well not only to acknowledge that, but also to think about how such a blended policy could help us now and in the future.
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I'm in my mid 50s and have witnessed a migration of definitions applied to capitalism and socialism. I now am confused as to the definitions of each. I know that my examples are elementary, but how can we be capitalistic under the same definition as in 1969 when we have the farm bill, asymmetrical tax structures, and greater inequality? And what is socialism now? There are multiple examples around the world that fall under this definition.
I ask sincerely, and I consider Mr. Stephens a good source to explain these clearly, and in 2019 terms. THEN I can make a reasonable choice for whom and what to vote for.
Listening to these people like Yang in the Democratic presidential pool arguing for '$1000 a month just for existing' will never catch on with the American public.
On the other hand, we're in the top 1% and paid more taxes this year, so I had to ask my wife, " who *really* is making the money here?" It isn't the sub 1m households with big mortgages. It's the investor class.
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As soon as a columnist trots out the usual statistics to prove how wealthy the country is, my eyes glaze over. An example of the unreliability of GDP, median income, what have you, as indicators of economic well being can be made with a comparison of what caused the last financial collapse. CDOs, credit default swaps and derivatives looked very good on paper and made money for the Wall St. barons but when the crash came, how whole one was made depended upon which tranche one was a member of. Look at society as a group of tranches and place yourself in one of those tranches. Were you in one of the preferred ones? Or did you lose your job and your home and your hope for the future? This might not be a totally accurate financial analogy, coming from a layman, but the measure of success of an individual has more to do with an accident of where in society he or she was born than which economic system was in place. That is the root of the problem.
Bret, you suggest that a successful candidate has to make a pledge to capitalism by embracing a mantra that says: "Capitalism has worked for millions. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone." What exactly and specifically should be done to make capitalism work for everyone? Empty platitudes in soundbites no longer work.
The real modern day American crisis from economic, civic, and spiritual levels is that a financial elite has elevated the economy to the level of a god - a god that must be worshiped - while abandoning the notion that an economic model can only endure when it satisfies the needs of the people who live under it. All hail the free-market; all hail GNP growth; all hail capitalism. Those who are dissatisfied are demonized as radicals and heretics because purity demands blind commitment to a system that is falling short.
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If I thought for a second that the style of capitalism that is currently in play in the US represented the style of capitalism that benefitted my father in the 1950s (but applied equally in a way that it was not then) I would go in whole hog for your argument.
But it's not.
As much as unfettered control of business by the government is a dangerous form of socialism, unfettered control of government by business is a dangerous form of capitalism. Amazon paying no taxes and Citizens United, to say nothing of the use of the Presidential Seal to promote business interests, mean that the form of capitalism that we are edging towards is extreme and dangerous.
We need to reform it for sure - and to reach a moderate position, that pendulum needs to have some impetus in the opposite direction. That's what I am seeing the more progressive arm of the Democratic party provide.
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In today's Times I read a Republican strategist pleading with Democrats not to bar Fox News from hosting Democratic primary debate. Like she really has their best interest at heart. Now Bret a capitalist hawk lectures Democrats how best to be the party of immiseration. For decades of course they certainly didn't need such a lecture. But now with some real insurgent energy actually having an impact he is trying his best to tame it. Ross Douthat and David Brooks the other two members of the reactionary trio (they probably are not quite that anymore) also keep lecturing Democrats what to do. Embrace the deadness that has been your core. A party that more resembles us should be your goal.
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Words fail me.
Really, they fail when confronted by someone who has had a life of privilege and cherishes the leadership of the traditional religions and merciless captains of industry.
I am a socialist, because I own America, from sea to shining sea. I own the seas and its fish, I own the land and its oil and I own the skies and the life giving air.
But cutthroat capitalism, now, that says I am poor, so I at best a guest worker, and I own nothing, not even the hope of a safe and decent life in my old age, for it wants to abolish social security and medicare.
No, FDR had it right when he said that "government by organized money is just as bad as government by organized mob".
You, Mr. Stephens, are part of the mob and salute its standing on the neck of the poor and the powerless.
Words just fail me.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
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To be honest, the Colorado Governor is not a serious candidate for the Presidency at this time. Take a chill pill.
There is a big difference between capitalism & crony capitalism. A big problem is we rarely hear the distinction in any discussion to include by so-called journalists. What we have in America is crony capitalism. There are few competitive markets for many things in our economy, there is almost no regulatory oversight of many de facto monopolies, the legal system is heavily tilted against individuals in favor of corporations, there is little shareholder accountability within most public companies and the tax system is heavily tilted in favor of established corporate interests.
And do not even get me started on corporate personhood.
In the Progressive lexicon, capitalism refers to the peculiar American variety with all the problems listed previously- not the sterile and innocent looking dictionary variety. What we want is not a takeover of private enterprise, but a system where corporate interests do not have such outsized political, legal and financial power.
As FDR said:
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
Oct 31, 1936
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If capitalism means selling anything to anyone regardless of consequences, then count me out.
Profit can't be the only point. Selling nuclear bombs to a risky buyer is simple insanity. Or ignoring the environment (which we all share obviously) is pure masochism.
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It's amazing how you can totally disregard the massive business closings which will leave thousands unemployed. Sears, a 100+ year old business is shuttering stores, JC Penney is on the chopping block, your own paper has been continuously reporting on the demise of the auto industry. GM just shuttered a Chevy Cruze plant that employed thousands . There are no other jobs for these people. The ripple effects of this plant closing will affect the viability of other small businesses downstream.
As for the uptick in wages how much of it is due to states raising the minimum wage? Massachusetts has raised the minimum to $15 by the year 2022, I believe. The pay goes up incrementally each year. These raises aren't by the businesses' choice, they are mandated by the government. But you disingenuously leave this information out of your celebration of the roaring economy. My husband works for a union shop with guaranteed 2.5 percent raises yet new hires are starting at a lower hourly rate than when he started employment there 11 years ago. It takes far longer to climb the pay scale to the top rate. Maybe you should leave your gilded ivory tower once in a while and talk to the common man. Things aren't quite as rosy as you dishonestly present. And you gloss over the massive deficit under the trump administration. But, as always, that mess will be left for the next Democratic president to clean up. As always, wash, rinse, repeat. Sadly, Americans never learn.
"To prevail, a moderate Democrat will need to behave likewise. The message can go like this: Capitalism has worked for millions of Americans. It worked for me. We need to reform it so it can work for everyone."
I don't agree with everything in this column, but this piece of advice is excellent and exactly what Democratic candidates should be saying. Americans do not want to entirely scrap the capitalist system, but they do want substantial safeguards to make it fairer and more equitable in certain areas. Buying and selling of cars, computers and peanut butter works just fine under the current system. It's with goods of vital necessity to survive such as health insurance, education and public health/environment where we need far tighter regulation.
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@Frank Roseavelt
The problem is that every so-called "safeguard" has unintended consequences and costs. What progressives always fail to consider is the price on average Americans of their proposals. They think they're sticking it to big businesses, but their proposals are often like a giant dragnet, sweeping up millions of unsuspecting small businesses and average Americans.
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Correct. Capitalism has gotten a bad name, mostly because of greedy jerks. The best guy I ever worked for was a devout capitalist and committed Republican. He made a lot of money. He complained about liberal whining, certainly my own. He also made sure that all of his employees had health insurance, attended to our complaints like a stricken uncle, and made himself available, day and night, to the concerns of his staff. The problem with capitalism is that there aren’t more capitalists like him.
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@Michael Judge
Bingo! People need to pay attention to Steven Pinker and the late Hans Rosling on this issue. Global capitalism is currently pulling 2 million people every week out of absolute poverty, and this will not be slowing any time soon.
Yes, capitalism brings diffuse benefits but concentrated pain, which is why we need a safety net to ensure that those who fall through the cracks have food, shelter and medical care. No American should be starving or without shelter.
Norway, Canada, Japan- these are fundamentally capitalist countries with mixed economies. But, they are not socialist, where a centralized government decides how much of any given item to produce and distribute. Let’s neither confuse these terms nor throw the baby out with the fish sticks.
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@Michael Judge
So, you are saying capitalism works best when we care about each other. That's socialist too. And I agree, this ought to be considered a social norm. Capitalism and socialism never work well taken alone. The best economic systems tend to allow some to remain rich, without leaving behind those who are poor. The discussion should not be one of "capitalism versus central planning", but how can we form a nation using the best features of both systems?
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@Michael Judge: Michael, there aren't more capitalists like him because they've gone out of business. Yes, some entrepreneurs are just greedy. But most are hellbent on lowering costs and chasing profits because that's the way the system is structured. They can't afford to provide more generous benefits than the other guy because then the other guy will sell at a cheaper price and get all the customers. Success in the competitive market place demands that entrepreneurs be hard-minded, and this constraint makes a virtue of selfishness and, yes, greed. That's why only government regulation can save capitalism from itself, something Bret Stephens doesn't seem to understand.
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