Creating Real Capitalism

THERE WAS A TIME when capitalism flourished in America, but that time has long since gone. Before the revolutionary war, America was intended to be a supplier of raw materials for English manufacturers, and a market for finished English products. That arrangement actually endured until the War of 1812, after which economic relations with Britain were severely truncated, and the new nation, in order to achieve prosperity, was forced to become its own supplier of goods and servcies. The Tariff Act of 1816 protected young American industry from foreign competition, and high tariff rates throughout the nineteenth century created astounding american economic growth, such that by 1900, the U.S. was already the world's leading industrial power. Things changed after the civil War. Business competition, as it naturally does, led to larger and larger enterprises, resulting in aqcuisitions, mergers, and reduced competition. The era of the "robber barons" began, which continues to this day. In response to the monopolies of the late nineteenth century, the government created the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, but since it has always been selectively enforced, and rarely enforced, it has no real value. Every economic ill could be cured by enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Free marked capitalism cannot flourish in the absence of free markets, and in an economy in which every major industry is dominated by a few huge corporations working cooperatively rather than competitively, prices remain artifically high, and wages for workers artifically low. At the present rate, there will come a time when all the world's wealth is owned by one person. As long as the American political system is owned by an elite corporate complex, real economic prosperity, for everyone, will be impossible. Now is the time for another American revolution, a revolution of renewed mass capitalism to destroy our current system of monopolistic oligopolistic economics. Up with the barricades!