I don't entirely disagree.
Continued economic survival will be messy & imperfect at best.
Yes, but all things else being equal, the economy will be better for all, by far, under libertarian capitalism.
The definitions I'm working from would have been wholly uncontroversial up until the mid-20th century, when there was a concerted effort to muddy the discourse by defining things in fuzzy ways (for example, treating captialism as if it referred to trade in general, in order to make anti-capitalist arguments sound absurd).
Not absurd, just the socialists and anarchists screwing with the dictionary as is their perpetual want.
Capitalism is a theory of ownership in an industrial context, in which the owners of capital are held to be solely entitled to the profits of the venture (hence the name).
Yeah, but a capitalist is also a guy who takes his own money and opens a book store, hires employees, and keeps the profits from the capital he risked, if there are any. The employees only risk loosing their jobs if the venture fails, along with the owners capital.
Capitalist:
: a person who has capital,
especially invested in business;
You're talking about a government of the wealthy, which is a plutocracy. If a government sells itself to corporate interests, and the voters don't hold them accountable, who is ultimately responsible?
All labor that goes into producing the goods and services are treated as a production cost that the capitalist covers in the form of wages. Wages are seen as fair recompense because capitalism explicitly denies the labor theory of value, according to which workers are entitled to the products of their labor.
You mean communism.
And there are many avenues available to such workers to turn some of their earnings back in to their own company or other companies if they choose. The widely popular IRA does that very thing for workers. Then the government can come along, force banks to loan money to those who can't afford it, and crash the economy. The corporations get the blame since the Truth rarely makes it out of the lock the mainstream media has on it.
And nowadays most capitalists are shareholders in corporations who don't even necessarily have executive duties. Simply plunking down the cash is enough to entitle you to a share of the dividends. That is capitalism in its most basic, elemental form.
RE: my last paragraph.
Socialism, by contrast, is based on the labor theory of value, which holds that the workers who do the producing are entitled to the full value of what they produce, and that paying them a pittance and sending the profits back to the owners of the capital constitutes a kind of theft or parasitism on the part of the capitalists
But it doesn't work because there is no risk reward incentive for gathering the capital in the first place--and it is much more vulnerable to predatory despots.
(who probably only had capital in the first place because of a history of exploitation, theft, banditry, and gaming the system).
More demagogic class warfare.
And despite mythology to the contrary, the system isn't designed to create new capitalists. It happens, but it's extremely rare, as the capitalist class isn't terribly keen on competition.
I agree, but that's the result of corporate/government cronyism. And what one system perpetuates and worsens that situation? The income tax. Notice we don't tax wealth, only income and the greater the income the bigger the cut. It's keeps new members in the top mega-wealthy few and far between.
Hence the need to keep wages low, gut social services............
Socialism has been keeping social services growing for the last 80 years, culminating in the latest economy crushing train wreck, Obamacare. The U.S. "poor" were already covered. The fact you can't/won't see that speaks for a rock hard bias.
