I think I might just have seen the best example of how capitalism does work. My mother is a teacher, she teaches a combination class of kindergarten and first grade and last week she started paying them for different things. Now for the last few years she has done this thing in her class where her students have banks and they can get pennies and nickels for different things. A couple times a month she has class store, where they can buy different things with the money they earned, or they can decide to save it. If the kids save their money, they get a nickel for interest. Last week she decided to change this up a little, now as the week goes by, she gives her students points for keeping their tables clean, doing center work, being helpful to other students, different things. Then on Friday, she gives them a paycheck. The students go to the bank, they have to sign the back like real people do, she stamps it just like the bank does to make the check void, and they get money. Because I am a college student, I got an extra week of break and spent last week with my mom. It is amazing what took place in one week. The room was cleaner, the students were doing more work at centers, and less playing, the students listened better. They get points for keeping their pencil bags neat, Thursday when my mom checked the kids pencil bags, there was only one student who had a messy pencil bag.
According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, capitalism is, "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market." The word private pops up in this definition a few times, and that would be the key to capitalism. Individual people make their own decisions. When you leave things up to the individual, they are going to make smarter and better decisions. Like the children in my moms class. When told they get money for keeping their table spaces, and chair pockets clean, what do they do? The clean, and now the room is cleaner. Besides learning personal responsibility of their own possessions, they are learning how to make their own decisions, learning cost benefit analysis. Why can't older people understand this. Why can't our president and many people in congress understand this. When you give people personal freedom, here is a shock, we run our own lives according to how we see fit. Yes there will be some who don't run it well, but they have every right to do that. And if people know they won't get help from the government, don't you think people would be smart enough to make smart decisions so they can survive? Maybe that's what it come down to. Maybe some people in government think that we are stupid, they are smart and they need to run our lives for us. Maybe we are stupid, maybe we can't run our lives, but at the end of the day, I would rather have my freedom then money from a government.
And to all the people who say it can't work, it worked before 1935, before President Roosevelt passed the social security act. I'm just thinking if capitalism works in a kindergarten/first grade classroom with six and seven year olds, why can't it work outside of the classroom. While it has its flaws(like every other system), it does work, when people don't try to combine capitalism and socialism. You cannot have a capitalistic economy with a government who taxes huge amounts to pay for a million different things, a government who spends too much money.
Think about that, it works, it really does, when the system is allowed to function like it is supposed to. And I wish I was some doctor of something in some big university because I would totally love to do an experiment about this, have two different classrooms, one like my moms, the other where I would pay the students equally regardless of what they did.
Sources
Dictionary-Capitalism: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capitalism
Social Security Act: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=68
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