A very good article, Chuck, much to the point. The problem of capitalism is not the functioning of the free market itself, but the political organization that guides the free market. As you mention, the USA does not have a good political system in place.
Allow me a quick explanation how this is not a good voting system. It's actually fairly simple. Take US Senators, they are voted in place with the average support of 60% of the voters.
That means that 30% of the voters get their Republican Senators, 30% of the voters get their Dmeocratic Sneators, and the largest group of voters, 40%, goes home empty-handed.
It is this empy-handed group of voters that hollows out our political process, because it takes just 30% of the voters to lead the nation.
In Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain, it takes 50% of the voters to lead the nation. They have better capitalistic outcomes because they must listen to the voters better. Their voting system is fair. Ours is structurally rigged and incorporates one round of divide-and-conquer automatically in place when we go vote.
Internationally, when a nation can lead with just 30% of the voters, this will establish an elitist system and this will export its benefits for the elite to the elites elsewhere. In other words, the USA does not only have a problem delivering a fair outcome to its own people, it also exports deep competition in the free markets of other nations. Simply put, when investors do not need to share will all of society in the USA, then the rich of other nations will want to park their money here and get the greater investment returns. We are exporting an economic elitist model. We hollow out the good standards of other nations, one negotiation at a time.
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The good news is that there are options to change the US voting system without changing the US Constitution. It is just baby steps, but they can be taken and that is most important.
Grassroots organization Local Revolutions uses the US Constitution to demand that cities and counties use the Proportional Voting system. It is the law and hundreds of political science professors have not formulated an answer that says it is not the law. A good number agrees that the legal demand is correct.
Once Proportional Voting is implemented at the local level, the wool will come off our eyes and we will see that winner-take-all is a fascist voting system in that it delivers the win to an elite. It does not deliver the win to this group and then that group and then another group. When stepping back from the political details, we can see that it delivers the win to a rather specific elite.
Come join our group if you want US capitalism to ease up and be better for us all. In the past, our system never delivered for all, and it was only because of major events such as the Great Depression that we got the New Deal. Normally, we never establish anything like that. Normally, we always undermine, hollow out, squeeze and compete for our valuable resources. Until the balloon pops. Or until we make the political changes we should have made 100 years ago.
Come join us, Chuck, for a better society and a better world.
