Is capitalism and the free market system best for America?

Yes

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by Tristan Taylor

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If there had to be one answer to this complicated problem then it would be "yes". All of us who have witnessed the way our current economy is sliding into a deeper and deeper pit have good reason to question the economic system that got us where we are today.

However, it is important to note that things are not always what they seem. Most Americans assume that we have had a capitalist model in this country since its humble beginnings over 200 years ago. Sure, it is generally accepted that our nation has become a little more socialist over time, especially with the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

However, most Americans are still under the impression that, with the exception of recent bailouts of some sizable United States businesses under the Obama administration, this country has historically been a capitalist one, whatever that means.

Let us consider a definition of capitalism:

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. (Merriam-Webster)

Okay, swell, we've got a nice, tidy little definition of capitalism, but is that really the kind of economy we have had? To one extreme is pure free market capitalism where everything can be bought and sold with absolutely no restrictions and where there is no government ownership of the means of production.

At the other end of the spectrum is communism which includes public control of all the means of production and total control over what can be bought and sold. Somewhere in between is socialism which has a little bit of both. It is generally accepted that the American economy has historically been pretty close to capitalism, and that, it has only been very recently that the United States has drawn anywhere near socialism.

Well, even before Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal brought us a deluge of new government spending and programs, state governments and, eventually the federal government, decided to make one very important part of our economy follow a socialist model; they created public schools.

We've been taught to believe that public schools are a necessary part of our American lifestyle. Without it, it is assumed that nary a soul in the country would receive a decent education. We would all be walking around semi-literate, with no real future, no job, and its quite possible that most of us would bathe only once a month. Naturally, there might be a few educated souls in the upper classes, but surely not anyone else.

We can't presume to know that things would be worse in our country had we not initiated public schooling. If I am not mistaken, there is strong public concern not only about the state of public education in our country, but also about the dysfunctional state of the American family. In an increasing number of cases, there is no semblance of the traditional family.

All there is is a mother with her children (if the kids don't live with relatives or friends) with a possible combination of other live-ins that may or may not be related to one or more of the children. With things as bad as they are, one has to wonder how they could be much worse.

Which brings us back to the point of this article. Do we need capitalism and a free market or do we need to completely abandon these for government run health care, insurance, and industry? My argument would be this: that the reason so many Americans feel the need for government to take over so many areas of the economy is that they have been taught to feel like they need to be "taken care of".

When government started taking the responsibility of educating children away from parents by creating public schools with the public's tax dollars, that was the day that self-sufficiency began to suffer in this country.

Parents are no longer in the position to be a significant influence in their child's lives. Too many parents cannot handle the temptation of there being a "free, safe, social, and supposedly beneficial" place to send their children eight hours a day so that they can feel free to have both themselves and their spouse working, bringing in extra income, helping to provide for a bigger, better house and another shiny car.

So the kids run off to school to eat breakfast and lunch, to checkout whatever they want in their school library, to sit and talk with whoever they want at lunch and in the hallways. By the end of the average school day, parents have often seen their children for just a few short hours, if not less, due to the number of extracurricular activities kids get themselves into at school.

They eventually start playing sports or join the band, start dating (lest they become a complete outcast) and start having to deal with peer pressure that is incredibly hard to withstand. By the end of their high school years, a large majority of students are using alcohol or drugs and have become sexually active. This is the sad reality of how government institutionalization affects our children.

The main problem with government run operations is that they do not operate under the incentive of profit as no one really 'owns' them. No matter how hard they try to employ new ideas and creativity, the only thing that bureaucracies have ever really proven they can do is get big, unwieldy, and inefficient. This is exactly what our entire economy has become, a larger model of the incompetence and ill-conceived design of our nation's public schools.

Schools which are constantly spending more and more money and instituting 'new and better' models for discipline and learning. None of which are really making a difference.

What kids really need is to be trained in such a way that they are efficiently prepared for the career they are most likely to have in their lifetime. This may sound cold and calculated but we have all been brainwashed into believing that cultures that don't teach their children to play music and write poetry, very quickly begin to morph into something akin to Nazi Germany. Letting parents make their own decisions about educating their children has nothing to do with creating such an inane culture.

The assumption is that kids won't 'get' any culture unless we have public schools giving it to them. Again, what does the current evidence show? Are our kids cultured? More importantly, are they well prepared for today's job market? More important still... are they maturing enough to one day run this country?

When parents make lean decisions about what they want their children to learn to do, who they want to have provide that education, and at what age that education will take place, our society will again become dynamic and vibrant. Parents will get back many of the daily responsibilities that they lost many years ago and have since completely abdicated.

Children may not spend as much time as before taking a broad range of classes designed to make them perfectly well rounded (in which many of them suffer daily due to embarrassing inadequacies). Instead, they will have much more time to do as many home-schooled kids do now, become incredibly competent in their best talent area due to being able to learn at a highly accelerated rate with whatever tools they desire to use, for however many hours a day they happen to be interested in learning.

In conclusion, any government interference in our personal lives has a way of creating a dependency on government that becomes more and more pervasive until, finally, society is so broken that we assume government is needed to fix everything. In reality, we have a nation full of people with lots of knowledge and no character.

Few Americans have the discipline to buy houses and cars they can truly afford. Few Americans are able to save for the things they want and, instead, charge those things on plastic. Lastly, too many American children spend most of their youth getting book smarts to the near complete exclusion of the traditional skills that will later save them incredible amounts of money. Skills like learning to cook, garden, and sew; skills which have been all but lost.

Imprudently, families eat out all the time and don't use fresh fruits and vegetables but instead choose unhealthy fast and processed food. Families are also more likely to throw away clothes that in the 'old days' would simply have been patched.

I, therefore, propose not new government programs that will baby us poor, poor, Americans and make us even more dependent and useless (watching TV, playing video games and surfing the internet) but that we, instead, eliminate some old ones starting with public education.

You want change? That's change. More importantly, that's change that will restore America's greatness and heal our sick economy. That's change we can believe in...

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