"What kind of capitalism do 'we' want?" Introduction First of all, I will provide a quick overview of the evolution of capitalism since the Great Depression, which I believe is necessary to understand today's capitalism and some of its problems. Then I will analyze four different problem areas of free market capitalism in the United States compared to Scandinavian government-run capitalism. I will then discuss the type of capitalism we want: being different interest groups, such as shareholders, CEOs, the average worker and the poor. Finally I will discuss what values might be at play in capitalism. The Evolution of Capitalism In the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s threatened to destroy the capitalism that had evolved over the past 400 years and this led to abandoning laissez-faire capitalism and instead embracing the New Deal concept of government-run capitalism in order to control the money supply and government spending and in order to limit the growing income inequality gap. The 1950s and 1960s were decades of equality, but the energy crises of the 1970s forced the government to revive the economy by imposing new taxes that benefited the rich and once again caused growing inequality. Today, capitalism is the predominant economic system in the Western world, in its various forms: in the United States there is a more free-market based capitalism, and in Western European countries (especially Scandinavia) capitalism is a more government-run type . The Role of GovernmentAmerica has the highest real GDP per capita in the world. However, this is only a measure of the economy, not a measure of the well-being of the average American. GDP is not redistributed in favor of the poor as is the case in Scandinavian government-run capitalist economies, leaving a huge gap between rich and poor. Taxes paid in Scandinavia are considerably higher than those in the United States because today's capitalist America has very limited government interference. Plutocratic Conditions Meanwhile, the richest are getting richer, which shows signs of plutocratic conditions governing the United States. CEOs receive huge salaries; in fact today the real average annual compensation of the top 100 CEOs is 1,000 times the salary of ordinary workers. In a government-run capitalist country like Denmark, plutocratic conditions of this magnitude would not be feasible. Political influence The largest corporations have become the key influence on political bodies. For example, the oil industry in the United States.
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