Allan Milne Lees
1 min readMay 5, 2021

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To be clear: capitalism is the application of capital to increase gross factor productivity. That's all it is. The USA is very corrupt, the wealthy and powerful buy politicians to pass legislation that makes them even more wealthy and powerful. That's not capitalism. The USA is dysfunctional, making ordinary people imagine that decent education and adequate health care for all is "unaffordable" because once again the wealthy and powerful have paid politicians to write legislation that makes them even more wealthy and powerful and so ordinary people's interests are ignored. That's not capitalism. The USA is merely a corrupt oligarchy, and that's not capitalism. Blaming an abstraction for the very real ills of a nation is not only intellectually incoherent but also self-defeating. You can't do anything about an abstraction (especially when you have misunderstood it fundamentally) but you can do something about corruption - at least in theory. In practice, however, the wealthy and powerful have it all sewn up. And that's not capitalism.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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