Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system of private ownership and management of production for private profit. It uses a free market where the state has no economic intervention or regulation of prices.

This is seen by many to be the only workable system. It has good goal that most people would agree with:

 - everyone should have the opportunity to make profit and be allowed to keep what they have worked hard to produce
 - business will control what is produced based on what the market will buy, so there will always be enough for everyone
 - any shortages that may happen will produce more jobs in order to fill them
 - everyone can give 100% and thereby provide for themselves what they need.

This system seems to be able to continue indefinately, but does it have a dark side?

I still believe that people are basically selfish. So how does that manifest in a Capitalistic system?

Capitalism works because it is a greed based system that appeals to our dark side and uses our greed instead of being destroyed by it. Socialism hopes that all people will be altruistic and it fails as  it hits our lazy tendancies. But Capitalism assumes that we are selfish and it uses that to strengthen the system.

 - Because I am greedy I will give 100% if I can keep all the profits
 - Because I am greedy I will produce what people want because they will pay the most for it and I will make better margines
 - Because I am greedy I will try to undercut my competition by being as efficient as I can and that will drive prices down which benefits our customers

The system works well because it understands our nature. But does that have a down side? Sure it does.

To increase my margines I need cheap labour and for that I need a large labour force that is unemployed and desperate for work. Then they will work for next to nothing.

Capitalism will alway seek a large pool of extremely poor people to feed the system cheap labour and thereby increase the margines for the rich.

This is the fundamental flaw of Capitalism. It would work great if everyone was more concerned about their neighbour than they were about themselves but they are not.