All you need to do is form a group, like a union, pool your money, and the working poor can bribe away just like the rich. This is not an obstacle.
What about amending the constitution? I guess you’d have to make it beyond that too.
I don’t know if I believe the original argument because much of our spending goes to the middle and lower class. Subsidized education, social security, medicaid and medicare (about 2 trillion dollars a year, 20% of the GDP) primarily benefits the poor and middle class.
If anything democracy (not capitalism) leads to socialism because the poor and middle class realize they can vote to give themselves more money via government programs and politcians respond by constantly upping the entitlement programs. Mace’s budget amendment would fix that issue too though.
Surely theoretical discussions of economic and political systems that have never existed in their pure states are still common in college classrooms, if nowhere else. Probably no economic or political system has ever existed in a pure state, that doesn’t preclude discussions of those systems on a conceptual rather than an historic basis. The OP opined that capitalism inevitably leads to big government (which he then called socialism). He did not say that his premise was to be considered only in terms of past history.
I respectfully disagree. It was closer than any other government, but there were some crucial flaws that very early allowed the government to grow beyond its original bounds. I believe this is because even the founding fathers could not agree on what the purposes and limits of governments should be, and so those limits were not written clearly enough into the constitution.
Roddy
In most/all cases, an army requires a big budget.
Only if it’s primary purpose is to fight other armies; cheap thugs with guns are enough stomp on your own people.
Brennan and Buchanan’s The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution explores such ideas in some detail. Chapter 3 is right on topic.
Der Trihs’ point remains apposite.
We seem to have a consensus that in order to contain the growth of government spending, one must have a constitution that strictly prohibits the introduction of government programs aimed at economic and social intervention. I don’t see how this would work. A constitution is only a piece of paper. It has authority (political or moral) only so long as human beings believe in it. If human beings want certain changes to their government, they will eventually get those changes. If the constitution prohibits those changes, the human beings who constitute the government while twist and stretch the document, use bizarre interpretations of ordinary words and phrases, and selectively focus on certain sections while ignoring others. If the constitution proves too resistant to change, the people will eventually throw it out and replace it with something they like better.
Free market capitalism doesn’t want any social programs. Free market capitalism wants the invisible hand to dictate just about everything that happens. You’re poor? Must be your fault. You’re rich? Must be something incredibly smart you did.
There are many circumstances that would mean those are not true. Socialism (seems to) want to level this playing field (if I’m wrong, please correct me).
We have almost daily debates between Constitutionalists and um…the opposite of such people.
The Constitution IS just a piece of paper, but its wording causes so many problems. It’s so precise in its laugnage in some areas and so vague in others. It would stand that it’s deliberately vague and deliberately precise in those areas. This, of course, we cannot know with extreme precision.
Life’s a bitch.
Capitalism doesn’t want anything. Ideological capitalists want the things you describe. As for working capitalists – businesscritters – all they want is the opportunity to make profits, and they are indifferent as to whether such opportunities are provided by the market or by government.
I think that’s nitpicking; belief systems do seem to have tropisms; I don’t think saying capitalism wants something is any worse than saying a tree wants sunlight. It doesn’t really, but it’s simply much easier to say so than saying that the units of which it is composed have collective tendencies in a certain direction.
But even in that sense Capitalism doesn’t “care” whether social programs exist or not. Capitalism is an economic system, not a governmental system. One might say that Pure Libertarianism doesn’t want social programs mandated by the government, but that’s not the same as saying Capitalism doesn’t. And even in that case Libertarianism doesn’t discourage voluntary social programs from the private sector. I know that certain people on this board like to argue that those in favor of Capitalism or Libertarianism are indifferent to the poor, but that’s hogwash.
The point is, actually existing capitalism – the system studied and analyzed by Smith, Marx and countless others – always has existed within a context of engagement with the state, because:
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Practically every modern government, regardless of its politics, has always exercised at least some regulatory control over economic activity; and
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In practically all non-Communist modern societies, the more successful businesscritters always have exercised influence over the government, far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, and generally have wielded that influence in their own interests, insofar as they could perceive their own interests.
Both of which facts the OP quite reasonably takes into account; and then it postulates those factors together lead to socialism, defining the latter as equivalent to “biggummint.” Which is a fundamental conceptual mistake. But then Roderick Femm and panache45 and commit an even more egregious conceptual error by asserting, in effect, “Hey, waittaminnit, if it exists in a context of engagement with the state, it isn’t capitalism at all!” No, guys. It’s capitalism. The real deal. In fact, if there ever were such a thing as free-market industry and commerce entirely separated from any influence by or over the state, that would be such a new thing in the world that we would need a new name for it. “Capitalism” simply would not be fitting.