Ending Capitalism

FAMED ECONOMIST JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES made a good point. At some point, he said, capitalism must be phased out of existence, a victim of its own success. The universe can only contain a finite number of people and their material possessions. Capitalism relies on population and economic growth. Keynes never specifically answered his own question: "when"?, but estimated that it would happen within a few hundred years, if not sooner.since no rational being needs or wants unlimited personal wealth, capitalism's retirement will consists in a reasonable distribution of wealth and standard of living for everyone. If corporate capitalism, which produces enormous wealth, does not succeed in bringing about the extinction of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, steady state Utopian socialism shall inherit the Earth. The word "capitalism" was invented in the nineteenth century to describe an economic system in which people invested accumulated capital to accumulate more money, without doing any actual work, preferring to leave physical labor to the exploited masses, part of whose production was appropriated by the investing class. The word has a distinctly negative connotation, everywhere. The word was an insult, aimed at the money changers. The capitalists were appropriately blamed for the depressions which occurred regularly throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. J.P. Morgan bailed out the United States in 1907, restoring some respect for the banking system which had failed utterly during the great depressions of 1873 and 1893. We in the United States of Amnesia have long forgotten that hourly wages paid to workers in sweat shop factories under intolerable conditions during the early post civil War American industrial revolution was understood to be slave labor. Generations of virtually enslaved factory workers fought by the thousands and died by the hundreds to abolish the hourly wage system. The author of the "Bible" of capitalism, Adam Smith, in his seminal "Wealth of Nations" (1776) condemned the reduction of human beings to automatons, to mind numbed brute workers engaged in endless, repetitive, body, mind, and soul crushing labor. Smith did not advocate for capitalism, he merely defined and described it. Something had to be done to save capitalism. hence was born the public relations industry in the United States, a massive propaganda campaign, which continues to this day, to convince the credulous public that the system of worker exploitation was in the best interests of everyone, a rising tide lifting all ships, an elite few of which would soar above all others, in the name of prosperity for all. It was and is a complete fiction, of course.