Hi Michael,

Capitalism has brought the greatest prosperity man has ever seen to this planet. It has produced goods like of which we have never seen: new clothes, cars, electronics, houses, and all of the things we enjoy today. Whenever most people think of capitalism, it evokes some kind of visceral hatred. The results of this system are all around us; it is not just Apple and Amazon that are capitalist, but every small business owner, every blue-collar worker, and anyone else who does not want to take from others - merely offer them something for which they receive something back. Fortune 500 companies are indeed benefiting from capitalist policies, but they are many more plazas and malls that house small businesses doing the same.

This is not just stressed by Smith, but Friedman, Rand, Sowell, and every other major capitalist scholar of the past century.

I didn’t mention the USSR or Venezuela very frequently. Regarding the latter, I cover the policies which helped lead to its downfall, and such policies - primarily the nationalization of industry - show a direct resemblance to the policies proposed by the DSA (i.e. Removing the private corporation).

200 years ago, at the birth of capitalism, there were only about 60 million people in the world who were not living in extreme poverty. Today there are more than 6.5 billion people who are not living in extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2015 alone (in Thomas Piketty’s view the devastating years in which social inequality rose so sharply), 1.25 billion people around the world escaped extreme poverty — 50 million per year and 138,000 every day.

I absolutely agree with your conclusion. A small group of individuals are using lobbyists, special-interest groups, and bureaucrats to manipulate the competition around them. Again, I one hundred percent agree this is not capitalism. However, we need to be striving towards capitalism and free-markets. Government has no place in the market. The greater the strive towards capitalism and individualism, the greater prosperity we will see. However, if we further enforce socialism and collectivism, we will see the natural imposition of statism.

Cheers, Adam