I will confess I'm not entirely sure whether this is parody or not. In any case, I'd think the Industrial Revolution starting in Britain may have had a thing or two to do with the rise of modern capitalism, as did the various New Deal policies in the US, the rise of social democracy in Europe, the introduction of healthcare, workers rights fought for by unions etc etc etc with mortality rates and the betterment of the population.
Ah, yes, we all remember those wonderful years prior to WW1 and in the inter-war period. The poor houses, poor health, child labour, the Great Depression, the rise of extremism not least because of economic deprivation and income inequality. It was all good fun. Good old days!
I don't know why every proponent of privately run services likes to proclaim that things cost money as if that's a revelation and somehow an original thought.
Of course services cost money, no one is disputing that. The point of contention seems to be that somehow meeting that cost through taxes is bad, even where that would mean that the cost is lower, while making people pay more to private insurance companies is somehow good because ... things cost money. That's not an argument.
So life isn't fair, no one said it was. That doesn't mean we're completely devoid of policy choices. We can either make it unfair by making some people cover the tab of those who can't, or refuse service or financially destroy those who can't afford insurance. Not having adequate healthcare isn't really a choice for most people and actually costs society a lot of money. The only upside, a lot of people get to choose which healthcare plan that won't meed their needs they want to go with. Gold star!
What kind of Ayn Rand fan fiction is this?! Did the whole push for neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s somehow escape you? Heard of Reagan and Thatcher?
The idea that capitalist societies are good meritocracies is as much a myth as that the socialist states in Eastern Europe were somehow workers' utopias.
There's plenty of shades of grey between the extremes and ultra capitalism just creates its own self-perpetuating elite class. Capitalist market economies work in the long-term because the state evens the odds to some degree.
Anything else is just wishful thinking and capitalist fanboying.
Big corporations may wield more power and have more influence over your life than government, yet are accountable to no one other than their shareholders. Your whole line of reasoning seems to suggest that they should be free of social responsibility or obligations.
It's a recipe for disaster and who has to pick up the tab when things break? Without exception its the state and the taxpayer, so there's your mandate for reining them in.
He's deluded. Capitalism was not a theory until the mid 1800s, based off the seminal work by the Scot Adam Smith.
The problem is that Marxism forfeited the argument that Capitalism had propagated in the halls of European monarchies after the success of the French Revolution's Laissez-Faire ideas from Rousseau. That combined with the Assignat proving successful to prolong a liquidity crisis also led to Fiat Currencies the US and Europe would experiment with in the 1840s-1890s (US Greenback the most well known to Americans).
The forfeited argument is the Social Revolution fantasy Marx proposes later where governments fall to rational communism, which is nothing more than Anarcho-Syndicalism. This is because Marx argues that government is the source of power to steamroll communism overthrow of bourgeoisie.
Marx, unfortunately, did not leave anything more than ad hominems against greed. This is where socialism rises as Stalin eliminates the idealist naïveté in Lenin and Trotsky. So, bourgeioisie rose in CCCP, where wealth was party connection, not money.
Same happened in China, however the Chinese such as Deng foresaw this and made the shift back to western capitalism as a hedge against political civil wars like Brezhnev and eventually Gorbachev suffered. No reason to make political reforms if the party is materially wealthy. And then the government does not need to regulate industry, as it is party controlled. Large corporations in turn become Ayn Rand's wet dream of government run capitalism in, ironically enough, Communist China.
Somehow the Chinese intelligentsia found the path Lenin had failed to recognize, the Social Question Marx had posited and failed to listen to Louis LeBlanc and others on. The path to power is not through union/corporate antagonism such as in the USA or EU, or through government mandated unionism (communism) in the CCCP , but through a Roman Republic style government that gives spoils to party enthusiasts who in turn give power to the "communist" party.
They have been attempting this in Europe and the USA for decades but because of open politics, the left-right antagonism of the French Revolution consumes economic cycles focused more on funny obsessions such as hats, flags, clothing styles, bedroom and bathroom preferences, as well as arguments over who is allowed to be rich based on political beliefs.
So, you two can have some stupid argument over the founding fathers or who has a larger "moral" or "ethical" requirement in the society based on a confused and schizophrenic post modern "philosophy" formed as a PTSD reaction to World War II.
Or you can recognize that the USA and EU have been a Roman Republic style oligarchy since about the 1980s when all of the major walls of the society were deconstructed by drug binging college academics more sympathetic to the anarchy of the CCCP's bureaucratic academic strangled collapse than the judgmental and extremely focused simplicity of Chinese ambition and human understanding.
In simple, there is no onus on a corporation to act in good faith towards their consumers. Government has been used as a cudgel of financially jealous academics that think that they deserve all the wealth and power like in the USSR than some random idiot from Cupertino who peddles high quality electronics.