Does anybody here have an interest in macroeconomics?

[Lighthead]

There is actually a movie called "Zeitgeist" which deals with the global economy and the way capitalism is flawed. The producer, a ninety-something architect, proposes a new way to live based on cooperation—very socialistic. It used to be free on the Internet. There are 2 Zeitgeist sequels, all good.

The real question is where does capitalism actually exist on earth?

The United States is a weird combination of corporatism and socialism that has the net effect of stifling all innovation which is not in the interest of large corporations.  And the regulators are captured by the corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The problem with socialism is that it's confiscation of the fruits of one's labor (denial of free will) where an elite class controls the allocation of the confiscated resources.  Of course, said elite class tends to spend the money in the interest of the elite class, but they throw a few bones to the people to make it look like they are doing something good.

Generally speaking, an elite class is interested in controlling money since that control gives them power over people.  The good people of the world who typically would do the right thing aren't interested in controlling money..  Guess who ends up controlling money in all cases..  So I would argue that no economic model will get us out of the mess we are in without major change.

The way to resolve the economic issues of the world is to have the release of suppressed technologies for free energy and a multitude of other areas, and in that period of innovation, pure capitalism would be the best model where companies compete against each other to produce the best mousetrap at the lowest cost.  These new technologies would reduce a person's daily costs quite significantly and usher in a new era of economic sovereignty.

I think that you're getting confused with true socialism and the failed, so-called communist states that, for example Russia and China have been, and are. China for example is not socialism at all. China is actually an economic system, deemed by many experts as, State capitalism. Soviet Russia was closer to what Marx intended in the first couple of decades, but it then devolved to a complicated system of bureacracy.

As far as what you were saying about the US, any system where there is an elite that has control of most of the money is nowhere near any type of socialism. Socialism is, in a way, an eradication of the current economic system that we have.


Edit: Our current economic system is outdated. As the gap between the haves and the nots increases (in other words, as the middle class declines in numbers), and as the robots continue to displace workers, we will increasingly need a system that is beyond capitalism. And perhaps beyond any theoretical model of socialism.