Capitalism, What Capitalism?

Capitalism: an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit

I started to listen to a discussion on the problems of modern capitalism, held by “great thinkers on the economy,”  and turned it off after just five minutes, having found out why our economy is sinking under its own weight.

The first exercise in lunacy was a discussion was about how “every problem has become a financial problem,” citing the example that if there is not enough energy then we must invest in more energy.

That would be a problematic approach if we were following it, because eventually we would be consuming more energy than the planet has resources to produce, but with a population increasing by 20 million every decade when was the last time we invested in new water supplies of any significance? When have we invested in transportation in any real sense?

Then they begin discussing the financial sector, the trading of financial instruments, as if it was part of capitalism, when in fact it is entirely artificial and is destructive to capitalism. It allows capital to become stagnant and to do nothing more than to produce more artificial capital in the form of debt not backed by any real or economic property.

The discussion was rapidly moving toward proof that finance has overtaken capitalism as the basis of our economy, to the almost complete destruction of the latter.

Back to the “energy problem;”  we should, of course, be designing a social model that consumes orders of magnitude less energy, but no one is talking about that.