Concluding Chapter to Part I of Let's Do What Works and Call it Capitalism

[danriker]

Chapter 9, the conclusion of Part I of Dan Riker's Let's Do What Works and Call it Capitalism is that we need a new national progressive movement. Part II will show how that can happen. Chapter 9 is posted at http://www.progressiveamericanthought.blogspotcom, http://www.danriker.blogspot.com and http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Dan%20Riker/

[Demeter]

1. Because calling it what it is (looting and pillaging) isn't good PR

[danriker]

2. Page Smith on Capitalism

In Part 2 of my chapter on the development of American capitalism, I have this quote from the historian Page Smith:

“The problem with capitalism, I suspect, is that its champions want to claim for it some inherent moral virtue. It is a very rough kind of economic system with many pre-, post-, and noncapitalist elements woven through it. It is clearly not “free enterprise” or “free competition.” In its heyday and subsequently, it has done its level best, through trusts and various devices, legal and illegal, to suppress free competition and use the national government to advance its interests at the expense of workers and consumers – that is to say, the general public. The best thing that can be said for it is that it has worked, at least on the material level, to provide more people with more things than any other economic system. It has done this, as its critics constantly remind us, at a considerable human cost....capitalism, far from being the champion of individual liberties and the classic American freedoms – of speech, assembly, etc. - has done its best, whenever it was able, to suppress all criticism of it, and prevent all measures designed to make it more responsible to its workers, and more accountable to the public. It has done this in the name of what it claimed to be a sacred and inalienable right (which it invented) to use its property as it sees fit