I also think that pure capitalism ultimately leads to oligarchy. I am not opposed to a free market but i think that the market needs to be tempered by government regulation, an active public sector and a highly progressive tax structure.
Simply put, in a capitalist system, money is power. "Power" is at it's base level, simply the ability to make other people do what you want. Money fulfills this very well. High concentrations of money will lead to high concentrations of power, which can be used to buy the government and are a threat to liberty and democracy. In addition, it's a lot easier to make money if you already have a ton of it. If i had 10 million dollars, i could put it in some banks, and do absolutely nothing for the rest of my life except live off interest. So i reject this idea that people who are wealthy are the best producers and deserve it... a lot of people are rich because they inherited it and then stayed rich because they invested it.
So that's why i support a progessive tax structure..... in the 50s under eisenhower, if you made more than 400k a year, the government took 91% of the excess... right now the top bracket tax rate is undere 40%... i think we need to add a new top bracket at about 2 million + annual income and put it at about 80%... so the government would take 80% of all income over 2 million. ( really, if you're making 2 million a year you're doing it because you're manipulating money not because you're actually worth that much. ). I also think there needs to be a pretty steep inheritance tax which should go into effect at about 10 million ... obviously don't take all of it but what is with these republicans and their talk about no "Death tax". Really, if your parents leave you 100 million bucks did you earn that money? No? then why can't the government tax it?
So i think two things: 1) People who work hard in private industry should be able to get ahead and live very comfortably... however at some point ( say, when they're earning over 2 million a year ) we need to start taxing the hell out of them because once you have too much money you can basically just bribe your way to even more money/more power.
I strongly agree that private corporations operating for profit, are more efficient than the government at many things. However there are a quite a few things that the private markets simply won't do or can't do as well as the government:
1) Education. I think it is fundamental that everyone be properly educated. I don't see how we can have a democracy if the citizens, who have to vote, are uneducated. Therefore I think that everyone is entitled to some basic level of education.
2) Police/Fire/Health. I can't imagine how a for-profit fire department would work. Would they not put out the fire if you didn't pay? i mean, really: If they don't put out fires, the fires are just going to spread to other buildings. So you either have A) much worse fires or B) Freeloader problem. Generally speaking, what is their business model? i can't think of any possible business model that would work for firefighters, except on contract from the government. I also think that the government should provide free some basic level of health care... i'm not talking about full health care like expensive treatments, just really basic stuff like vaccinations or emergency services. If everyone is not vaccinated, diseases spread easier. there's a certain critical mass level among the population, where if enough % of the people are vaccinated, the disease can't spread. But if enough people arn't vaccinated, then the disease can spread easier. So i think that vaccinations are something the government should mandate. I also think that emergency services should be provided by the government because i think that when someone is in a medical emergency they should not have to worry about getting ripped off by their medical provider... i think that cost should be the last thing on their mind. I also dislike insurance companies to solve these kinds of problem, because they charge you lots of money and then once a problem hits they point to some fine print in a contract and say "we don't cover this", and they make money by denying you claims.
3) Military for obvious reasons. The military obviously should not be a private enterprise it should be accountable to the democratic government. I also think that the military industrial complex, IE the people who build bombs, tanks and military weapons, ought to be federalized for a couple of reasons:
a) I don't think it's a good idea to have someone's livelyhood depend on whether the country goes to war or not. As it currently stands, whenever the country goes to war some military industrial companies get some fat contracts and when we don't go to war and buy their guns they lose a lot of money. So i think it should be federalized so that these people have stable income and also have no interest in lobbying the government into starting some war giving them some contract.
b) I don't see the advantage of being a private enterprise on this since they only have one customer, the government, which isn't rational like a normal customer. I dont' see how competition is really helpful in this case. It seems to me that contracts go to the people who have the most connections and government agents are inherently corruptible. So, basically you have a competition to see who can best bribe the government. Also, if the government doens't buy your stuff, who will? it seems like you just wasted your time if you don't get that contract from uncle sam. This just seems like the wrong industry for the free market to work in, I think the military industrial complex should just work on salary for the government and they should be run by generals, and not work as separate private companies on contract.
4) Scientific research and space exploration.
I don't think there's a lot of incentive for private companies to do scientific research due to the freeloader effect... whoever discovers something, helps everyone, not just themselves. so might as well wait for someone else to discover it and you'd be in just as good a position to make a killing off of it as them. We do have a patenting system however i think our patent system is broken as people patent anything and everything and it just causes a bunch of lawsuits and hinders innovation cause youv'e got to make sure someone else didn't "think" of that obvious thing before you did. although i'm getting off topic.
I also think the government should do scientific research because new discoveries and technologies have a tendency to overhaul existing organizational structures which private companies do not want... Let's take a hypothetical example:
A private health care company that treats cancer patients and gives help for cancer... They may know a lot about the subject, but they have no incentive to actually cure cancer. that would be like killing the goose that lays the golden egg for them. If someone made a simple 5$ pill that would cure cancer, it would completely shut them out of business. They'd be bankrupt. Private companies reallly have reverse incentive towards scientific research, because in some cases, research can completely destroy their business models.
I also think that the government should do space travel/exploration because i think that's something we ought to be doing as a civilization and it's too risky for private companies at least until someone gets a foothold. I think that in some point in the future we ought to have space colonies everywhere, but i don't see how this can ever really be profitable because the point of a space colony is to live somewhere else and what could you possibly ship back to earth that would be worth the money? I guess in some limited cases it could be worth it like maybe asteroid mining could be made to be profitable in the future but i don't see private companies leading the charge on space exploration.
5) Environmental protection. This goes without saying, private companies need regulation on this... if it saves them money to dump chemicals into a river or chemicals or massive ammounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, where we all have to drink it and breathe it and weather it due to climate change, or to dump toxic crap in a landfill which seeps into the ground water, there needs to be someone there to tell them HELL NO. Really this isn't much different than law enforcement. It's illegal for me to crap on the sidewalk for obvious reasons, i'd get arrested, so why should it be legal for private corporations to dump toxic crap into rivers or landfills without proper disposal or start unloading carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without taking any back out? Really, people, clean up your own mess, the government needs to regulate private industry in a way that keeps them from turning the country into an overheated toxic dump, this isn't any different from law enforcement.
... ok that was a long rant.