Are We Still Capitalist?

Capitalism is a market system. Historically there were other market systems in Europe before capitalism, in China and the Middle East. Capitalism is noted for producing lots of capital. I wrote about this before in an article entitled Market Systems.

What I wonder is have we regulated capitalism out of existence? With what we are going doing are we only getting a few rich and that is it? One of the hall markets of a capitalist system is a large middle class. Is that really disappearing? According to a lot of articles I have read it is.

I recently read an article which said in the US more companies closing than new startup companies. Apparently this is the first time this had ever happened in the US. The following article is not the one I had read, but I just google about this subject and an interesting article came up. The link to this article is here. It does not say exactly what I had read, but it is close.

This process has been going on in Europe for some time. Europe seems to be having a hard time encouraging the formation of new companies. There is a site ranking countries and number of startups by country and US is far ahead of everyone else.

However, when it comes to ranking of Entrepreneurial Countries neither my country of Canada nor the US is in the top 15. However, we are not in the bottom 15 either but Italy, France, Spain and Germany are. There are 7 European countries in the bottom 15. However, it does look like Europe is trying to change. See this from this pamphlet from the European Digital Forum

Certainly there seems to be a lot of people that think capitalism is bad. Yet it is the system that made the Western world rich and gave us a middle class. Yes we still have poor people, but we have always had poor people. In the past there seemed to be only the rich and poor. There was never a middle class. Also, historically we are living better than we have ever lived before.

On my other blog I wrote yesterday about Evertz Technologies (TSX-ET, OTC-EVTZF)... learn more. Tomorrow, I will write about Jean Coutu Group Inc. (TSX-PJC.A, OTC-JCOUF)... learn more on Friday, August 26, 2016around 5 pm.

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