Is Our Economy Really Driven By Capitalism?

To The Reader’s Forum:

If Adam Smith, the “father” of capitalism, were alive today, he would agree that our economy should work for our mutual self-interest, not for some of us but for all of us.

There has been a growing trend in our politics, however, that replaces Smith’s philosophy of capitalism — self-interest guided by the “invisible hand” of “moral sentiments” — with exclusionary selfishness.

For decades, our politicians, especially so-called “conservative” politicians, have embraced socioeconomic policies based, in large part, on supply-side economic theory, which ultimately rewards the accumulation of wealth from wealth and not from labor. Since most Americans labor in some way for a living, the gap between rich and poor in America has grown exponentially over the years.

The upper 10% of our population own 68% percent of the wealth in the United States today. The remaining 32% of our country’s wealth has “trickled down” to the rest of us. The bottom 50% of our population own a mere 2.5% of the wealth in the United States.

Smith foresaw this kind of corrupt capitalism when he wrote, “The disposition to admire, and almost to Worship, the Rich and the Powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

What is promoted as ‘capitalism’ in America today fails Smith’s “moral sentiments” test [Period].

Maurice F. Baggiano, J.D.,

Jamestown

published legal author, member of the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court