>For groups of more than a few hundred people (some say 50) this turns out to work better than any of the alternatives such as communism.
Citation please? Where has communism seriously been tried? Russia was trying a lot of things at the same time while simultaneously engaging in wars and dealing with their own in fighting. Communism didn't flourish in this environment, but what would? Capitalism itself depends on rule of law which was spotty at best.
>But it does cause income inequality as a necessary side effect.
Again, if you're talking about US levels of inequality I'm going to need another citation. I can't think of any developed country that isn't capitalist but I can think of a lot that don't have US levels of inequality.
>China may label itself communist but it is quite far removed from using communism as an organizing principle to create wealth.
Exactly. Granted, China does interfere in their markets a great deal (e.g. pinning their currency to the dollar artificially) but market interference isn't communism. It's a capitalist market their interfering with not a communist one.
> Citation please? Where has communism seriously been tried?
Actually communism works well on a small scale and even in the US it is practiced widely: the family. No one presents their kids with a bill at breakfast. There have been attempts of various success to scale this up in communities / kibuts / etc especially in the sixties. But everywhere it was tried on a nation wide level it failed, which was my point exactly.
> Again, if you're talking about US levels of inequality I'm going to need another citation.
I'm not claiming the US has the "right" level of inequality. They do have one of the highest inequalities and also one of the highest per capita incomes (discounting a countries with natural wealth like Norway). The OECD.org web site has all the numbers you are looking for. I'm not claiming that this is fair, I'm claiming the US has more wealth, albeit not equally divided. If you make things more equal there is a good chance you destroy wealth, and there is also a good chance less wealth hurts those at the bottom, although it can take a few years for the effects to show.
>But everywhere it was tried on a nation wide level it failed, which was my point exactly.
But I don't think it's been conclusively demonstrated to fail on it's own "merit" (so to speak) but rather due to "too many cooks in the kitchen" and/or outside interference. I don't know if this idea could every seriously work or not (I currently lean against), but I do know that people enjoying lots of power and wealth today don't even want to know due to the off chance that it might work.
>discounting a countries with natural wealth like Norway
Why are you discounting natural wealth? The US has natural wealth and a lot of size. We're either comparing it to other countries/regions or we're not.
>I'm claiming the US has more wealth, albeit not equally divided.
I would also question this. It's more or less true as a country but the US has 300 million people and 50 states, many of which being as large as European countries. So a better comparison might be US vs. the Euro zone in which case Europe has more wealth and it is more equally divided.
>there is a good chance you destroy wealth
There is some chance, but I think we're starting to see that it might not be the case and the opposite may even be true.
Citation please? Where has communism seriously been tried? Russia was trying a lot of things at the same time while simultaneously engaging in wars and dealing with their own in fighting. Communism didn't flourish in this environment, but what would? Capitalism itself depends on rule of law which was spotty at best.
>But it does cause income inequality as a necessary side effect.
Again, if you're talking about US levels of inequality I'm going to need another citation. I can't think of any developed country that isn't capitalist but I can think of a lot that don't have US levels of inequality.
>China may label itself communist but it is quite far removed from using communism as an organizing principle to create wealth.
Exactly. Granted, China does interfere in their markets a great deal (e.g. pinning their currency to the dollar artificially) but market interference isn't communism. It's a capitalist market their interfering with not a communist one.