Michael F Schundler
1 min readJul 27, 2019

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You kind of miss the whole point… socialism evolves from capitalism because enough people think capitalism has failed them and so put their faith in socialism which also fails them. You show the bread lines of socialism, but how about the violent overthrow of capitalist economies by those that feel they have nothing to lose.

Capitalism fails because it has no built in mechanism to insure the distribution of goods and services is adequate to insure that the vast majority of citizens feel “vested” in the system. So overtime wealth especially in a modern society naturally concentrates as “capital” crowds out “labor” with respect to the allocation of profits.

Socialism fails because it has no built in incentives to insure the society uses its resources to produce adequate goods and services to sustain.

Each fails for totally different reasons… so societies search for hybrids that leverage the power of capitalism to produce goods and services with “entitlements” (a form of socialism) that insures everyone feels some degree of investment in the society. That has been the cornerstone of the all of the wealthy nations of the world. The balance varies by society, but its presence is universal.

Around 40 years ago I remember reading a book in college that argued entitlements if done properly are the products of enlightened capitalists who invest a portion of their wealth to buying societal stability that insures they can add to their wealth, it saw entitlements as a necessary “operating expense” of capitalism. Nothing insures the wealth of the wealthy than the contentment of the poor.

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