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Capitalism in United States

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Submitted By thedon
Words 1399
Pages 6
Sylvanus Bockarie
English 102
Essay 4
Kinghon, Kevin A
Capitalism in United States

What Kind of Capitalism does Americans want? First of all, I am going to show a quick overview of the unfolding of capitalism since the Great Depression, which I believe is vital in order to understand the capitalism that exists in the United States today and some of the problems to it. Then I will look at four different complex areas of free market capitalism in America compared with the Scandinavian government control capitalism. I will then talk about what kind of capitalism we want: We being different interest groups, such as the shareholders, the C.E.O.'s, the average worker and the poor. Finally I will talk about what values might be at stake in capitalism.

In the United States, the 1930s Great Depression threatened to knock out the capitalism that had been gradually developing for the past 400 years and this led to abandoning the laissez faire capitalism and instead embracing the New Deal concept of government managed capitalism in order to control money supply and government expenditure, and in order to limit the increasing gap of inequality of income. The 1950s and 1960s were decades of equality, but the energy crises of the 1970s forced the government to kick start the economy imposing new taxation benefiting the rich and once again causing widening inequality. Today, capitalism is the most important economic system of the Western world, in its however various forms: In the United States a more free-market capitalism exists and in Western European countries especially in Scandinavia capitalism is a more government managed kind.

United States has the largest real GDP per capita in the world. However, this is only a measure of the economy, not a measure of the happiness of the average American. The GDP isn't being redistributed in favour of the poor as it is in

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