An interesting article in the Bulwark today, the title alone is guaranteed to terrify some.
How to save the free market, avoid an extremist backlash, and move America forward.
by RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON
The Gilded Age defies nostalgia. From roughly 1870 into the early 20th century, America spawned ostentatious opulence, income inequality, class immobility, grinding poverty, and the corporate monopolization of legal, economic, and political power.
By 1890, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population owned 51 percent of all wealth. The top 10 percent owned 86 percent. The lower 44 percent owned just 1.2 percent of total wealth. Burgeoning bribery and corruption intensified partisanship and polarization. Societal comity sickened.
This pathology spawned the progressive era symbolized by Theodore Roosevelt; two decades of reforms which helped relieve poverty; improved health, education, and working conditions; constrained corporate power; dismantled monopolies; and established the income tax. Yet it also protected capitalism from a more extreme reaction—because it persuaded ordinary Americans that democracy still worked.
Today, it takes little imagination to see a new Gilded Age emerging. In 2018, Pulitzer Prize-winning business writer Steven Pearlstein wrote Can American Capitalism Survive, accompanied by a telling subtitle: “Why Greed Is Not Good, Opportunity Is Not Equal, And Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor.”
The rest of the article.
https://thebulwark.com/the-case-for-...ve-capitalism/
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