GLOBAL: It isn't capitalism

18 October 2009

From Steve H. Foerster:

In regard to the article, GLOBAL: The global crisis of capitalism, I lost track of how many times the word "capitalism" was used but each one was jarring because each one was inaccurate.

The US and other Western democracies do not have a capitalist economic system, which would be a system with no governmental barriers to entry for startups with new ideas and less management overhead, no subsidies of major corporations, and no integration between regulatory bodies and the market leaders they supposedly oversee.

What we have instead is a corporatist economic system, one where government and major corporations maintain symbiotic control by placing regulatory and tax barriers to true competition from upstarts. This, not capitalism, is the system of "too big to fail" bailouts, where poor decision makers are rewarded rather than replaced.

* Stephen H Foerster is in the doctor of health programme in the school of health management at the Missouri-based A T Still University.

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