re: #399 HappyWarrior

I see libertarian/conservative friends point out that the world has gotten better and go “Thank you Capitalism!”, and I just feel like saying you do realize that the world really started to improve when capitalism got regulated. The Capitalism of 1868 is not the Capitalism of 2018 and that’s a good thing. I don’t believe in worshiping any sort of economic system. I believe in solutions and some are capitalistic, some are socialistic, some have both, and some might be neither.

It’s not really capitalism that improved things. Technological advancements, especially the industrial revolution and much more recently the advent of the internet, improved things. And more importantly gave ordinary people the space to be able to operate in the political world in a way that wasn’t really possible before. That helped create the first progressive era at the turn of the 20th century. The basic collapse of unbridled capitalism that was the Great Depression likely would have spelled the end of capitalism if it wasn’t for World War II and then the post-War alignment of interests in the Cold War.

That said, to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the rest that have been tried. Like any other human endeavor, it must be monitored and governed to limit its excesses.