2025-11-23

On Reforming Capitalism

These are the conventional definitions of capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.[1][2][3][4][5] This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth.[6][7][8][9][10][11] Capitalist economies may experience business cycles of economic growth followed by recessions.[12] (Source: Wikipedia)

What is capitalism?

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Capitalism is a widely adopted economic system in which there is private ownership of the means of production. Modern capitalist systems usually include a market-oriented economy, in which the production and pricing of goods, as well as the income of individuals, are dictated to a greater extent by market forces resulting from interactions between private businesses and individuals than by central planning undertaken by a government or local institution. Capitalism is built on the concepts of private property, profit motive, and market competition. (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica)


Capitalism

A term coined to describe the use of private capital to finance economic activity. Investors and entrepreneurs use their money to create businesses, hiring workers, renting property and buying equipment as needed. Any surplus, or profit, belongs to the entrepreneur or investors. Communism is seen as the obverse of capitalism, as all economic activity is controlled by the state. (Source: The Economist)

However a more to the point definition of capitalism can be expressed this way.

Capitalism: an economic system designed to transform the labour of the working class into the wealth of the owning class. (Source: The5thColumnist)

Capitalism started unrestrained until workers organized and at the cost of thousands murdered by capital (and the Pinkertons) forced employers to bargain with them, arguing for amongst other things a fair day’s pay for a fair days’ work. Workers union organizing also led to political victories including collective bargaining and labour standards legislation, as well as workplace health and safety legislation, and of course the weekend and extending the middle class beyond, doctors, lawyers and merchants.

The capitalist class was not content with earning a fair profit and invented the belief that corporations must seek the maximum return for shareholders with no regard to the workers, the community, or the environment and found ways to do this.

It included moving production abroad to countries with lower or no labour or environmental standards and where jobs could not be moved such as the service industry converting wage jobs to piece-work jobs or co-called “independent contractor” jobs in the so- called gig or app industry.

The result has been unprecedented inequality .

So what is the solution

A purist Marxist would suggest we just wait for (or hasten) the inevitable collapse of capitalism and then “bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old”. But such a strategy esquires the collapse of society as we know it and it will not be just the 1% (or 10%) of the wealthiest that may deserve to suffer but everybody in the middle. Only those with nothing to lose will lose nothing in this scenario.

This leaves the dreaded incrementalism as a practical solution that may even be able to achieve the political will to make it happen if done strategically.

Let us look first at the issues we want to address and I see two main issues.

Corporate concentration

The first being, despite capitalism’s claim of promoting competition, the reality is that it has lead to economies of monopolies and oligopolies with increasing corporate concentration driving the small businesses it was suppose to encourage out of business. Government regulation has been continuously weakened regarding corporate concentration particularly as it applies to the media, weakening one of the main pillars of democracy, an independent press.

This needs to be addressed and it is not a radical idea to go back to legislation and measures that existed previously while capitalism was thriving.

Economic and Political Inequality

The other being that, along with this, it has lead to massive personal economic inequality, and this massive economic power held by a few has become political power where even in so-called democracies the concept of one person one vote has been replaced one dollar one vote as far as the reality of political decision making is concerned. See: Economic inequality leads to democratic erosion, study finds | University of Chicago News.

One of the easiest ways to address inequality and redistribute wealth is through the income tax system and again I suggest we start by going back to taxation levels that existed while capitalism was thriving.

Marginal Tax Rates

Today in 2025 the marginal tax rate on the highest earners in the United States is 37% while in Canada it is 33%, but it has not always been that low.

Source: Comparing Income Taxes: Canada vs. USA in 2025

Between 1951 and 1963 the United States marginal tax rate on the highest earners was over 90%, while in Canada during the same period the marginal tax rate on the highest earners varied between 90% and 75%. Capitalism was thriving over that period, albeit without the ridiculous levels of income and wealth inequality we see today. As a first (incremental) step in tax reform I propose we go back to those levels.

Source: Bradford Tax Institute

Source: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Wealth Tax

The next (incremental) step in tax reform to address excessive individual income and wealth inequality should be a wealth tax. As of 2021, five out of 36 OECD countries implement a wealth tax on individuals. The New Democratic Party and Canadians For Tax Fairness both propose a modest wealth tax of 1% to 3% depending on level of wealth. The United States Democratic Party does not appear to have a consistent policy on wealth taxes, but both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed wealth taxes of 2% to 3% depending on level of wealth. I would propose we start with a wealth tax similar to those proposals.

Final Stage of Tax Reform

The existence of billionaires (and now trillionaires) is, to put it bluntly, immoral. The final stage of (incremental) tax reform, after people have been eased into the idea of a wealth tax, is to use the tax system to tax back all income over a million dollars a year and all wealth over 100 million dollars. I consider this to be modest proposal as it still allows for a considerable level of inequality but not the blatantly excessive and immoral levels we currently have.

Reigning in Capitalism

Render unto the public sector the things that are the public sector’s, and unto the privater sector the things that are the private sectors

There may be a place in the economy for capitalism and the private sector but it should not dominate our lives and society as it currently does. It needs to be put in it’s place.

Health Care

Nobody should profit from someone else’s misery. It is a simple matter of ethics and morality. Health care should not be provided for profit but should be funded and delivered by a single-payer public system that provides is better health care and better economics.

Source: Canadian Medical Association

Water

Water is essential for human survival so our access to it should not be dependent on someone else making a profit. As water becomes scarcer it becomes vital that governments protect our vital water supplies and not sell them off to the highest bidder. Our water supplies should not be put at risk for data centres to store the high tech industry’s (or even government’s) surveillance data on us and certainly not for it’s ill fated so called artificial intelligence dangerous LLM bullshit. Local water supplies should not be privately owned but preferably be municipal utilities. Water resources should only be made available to the private sector when there is a surplus to public needs.

Food

Access to food should also not be dependent on monopolistic corporations making excessive profits. Something needs to be done about the corporate concentration in the oligopolistic corporate agrifood industry.

Corporate Control of Agriculture – Farm Aid

GRAIN | Top 10 agribusiness giants: corporate concentration in food & farming in 2025

The Monopoly Problem at the Heart of Canada's Food System | Perspectives Journal

Corporate concentration | Food Policy for Canada

The best way to do that is to support family farms as well as agricultural cooperatives (agricultural cooperatives in Canada) and the supply management system including marketing boards

At the retail end of the food chain, the grocery sector. there is a similar oligopoly corporate concentration problem.

Canada's grocery business doesn't have enough competition — and shoppers are paying the price, report finds | CBC News

5 takeaways from the Competition Bureau’s study into Canada’s grocery sector - National | Globalnews.ca

Increasing Retail Monopoly Power Poses a Threat to Canada’s Post-Pandemic Economic Recovery [Op-Ed]

Walmart’s dominance of groceries should receive antitrust scrutiny, group says | CNN Business

The best way to counter that is for consumers to have a real choice to not support the monopoly grocery industry. Governments can best aid that by supporting non-profit food food co-operatives to ensure all consumers have a choice.

Grocery co-ops an alternative to corporate grocers amid anger, mistrust: experts

Co-Ops, Mutual Aid, and the Movements Against the Grocery Industrial Complex | Loose Lips Magazine

Toward fair and sustainable food systems: The role of food cooperatives and solidarity grocery stores – Food Secure Canada

Housing

North America’s dependence on the private sector for housing has not helped the current homelessness crisis, indeed it probably contributed to it. On the other side of the ocean in Finland at the end of 2021 long-term homelessness only affected 1,318 people and that is considered unacceptable under Finland’s Housing First Initiative which is not only the right thing to do but less costly than providing the social programs need to deal with homelessness.

North America needs to adopt a more European approach to public and social housing where public housing is not just for the very poor but also for ordinary working people.

Canada is facing a housing crisis. Could it take a page from Europe? | CBC News

What European housing models could do for Canada’s affordability problems

Europe’s affordable housing revolution: The power of leading by example - Affordable Housing Initiative European Partnership

We need to provide enough public or co-operative (being preferable) housing so that all Canadians that want to can access affordable housing on a rent geared to their income without being forced to deal with the predatory private market. The private market can still compete in niche and higher end markets and of course home construction will still be dominated by the private sector. Governments should also provide incentives and assistance for families that want to purchase their own modest homes.

Energy Choices and Climate Change

No discussion of capitalism would be complete without dealing with energy policy and climate change. We built an economy based on planned obsolescence and waste because that was good for capitalist profits. And we powered that economy with fossil fuels. The result:

Climate change is real.
Climate change is caused by human’s energy choices.
Climate change has done irreversible harm, and
Climate change s poised to do catastrophic harm.

All of this is true and highly documented. I am not going to insult the intelligence of those of you who choose to be informed by citing pages and pages of proof. Those who choose to be wilfully ignorant of the facts will not be swayed by any proof.

We need to act. The solutions are known. We need to phase out fossil fuels. No new projects. Governments that continue to support fossil fuels are putting private profits (and short term economic indicators) above the health of the planet and it’s human population.

We need to put a “price on carbon ” and disincentivize it’s use while providing support and incentives for the development and use of renewable energy. We also need to build a more sustainable economy that does not depend on waste and planned obsolescence. But that is a whole other book.

Failure of High Tech as Saviour

This section will be primarily informed by my own personal experience and observations (and research) over the last 60 years or so from first using punch cards to program Statistical Package for the Social Sciences on the Laurentian University mainframe, as part of my Techniques of Political Inquiry course, to my first personal computer, the Osborne 1 accessing Bulletin Board systems and freenets up to today’s Windows 11 machine accessing the Internet. For this reasons it will not include many, if any, citations and because doing so could overwhelm the user once I started. I was considering making this a separate blog post but I believe it belongs here.

There was a time when we made things in North America, even electronics and computers, and then the capitalist owners of the means of production thought it would be more profitable to make everything abroad in low wage countries with lax labour, health and environmental regulations. But don’t worry they assured us we were becoming a post industrial society with a knowledge economy and an information super highway. We would no longer work in factories with our hands but in offices with our minds. High tech was the new thing and it was going to save us all. It was great for awhile for a few who got the new high wage jobs, but many of the jobs turned out to be lower wage tech support jobs that did not replace the higher wage manufacturing jobs that were lost, and that they soon discovered could be sent overseas as well.

However it was a boost to planned obsolescence, with a twist that the electronic waste created was much more hazardous than broken down furniture and appliances in our landfills. Computers had to be replaced ever 18 months and smartphones every two years. At the beginning there probably were enough computer advances to justify that, though I got away with upgrading every three years but lately it has been more like every 7 years. However it was remarkable how capable those early PCs were. The Osborne 1 or original IBM PC, were capable of running full office software like Wordstar and Supercargo and even Dbase II. Programmers worked hard to get every bit of capability out of the software and hardware. Lately it seems the goal has been to bloat software and add unnecessary options to force users to upgrade their hardware. This is even more so in the smartphone industry where a new phone is needed so you can have rounded coiners.

At one point, because of a few successes, people were blindly investing in any company based on the web, regardless of any actual earning potential and then the “dot com bubble” burst. We are seeing the same thing with AI now, billions being thrown at to produce a massive GIGO machine that just makes stuff up, resulting in a massive waste of water and power and environmental degradation, not to mention the suicides caused by AI addiction or the AI directly telling them to kill themselves. Of course when the “AI bubble” bursts it might take the rest of the economy with it.

And high tech gave us the corporate and government surveillance state with the corporations saying they are doing it to make our lives better and the state saying they are doing it to make us safer, when in reality it is to consolidate their wealth and power.

Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, no need to detail the harm caused by them. Then we have the so-called gig industry which is just a way to avoid unions and exploit workers and the high tech billionaires exercising their political power to the point of buying the United States Presidency. More could be said but let’s leave it at that for now.

High tech saviour, my ass, just a better way to exploit workers, destroy the environment, and buy politicians,

Necessity of Government Regulations to Protect Workers Rights, Public Heath and The Environment

Deregulation is the darling of the capitalist media that argues all our economic problems would be solved if we did not have those pesky government regulations and just trusted corporations to put workers rights, public safety and the environment ahead of maximizing profits. They like to claim the market will regulate everything but the only thing the market regulates is maximum profit in the short term. It cannot even ensure a corporations’ long term growth or success. The market is very shortsighted and focused on profit only. So fuck the market.

The best proof of the need for government regulations to protect public health, the environment, and workers rights (including a minimum wage that is a living wage ), it is what happens when we deregulate.

10 Unforeseen Effects of Deregulation - UMA Technology

Disaster in the Making: he Quiet Erosion of Canada’s Regulation System

The Dangers of Deregulation – State of the Planet

The deregulation gamble: When worker safety becomes a political pawn | HR Law Canada

Trump’s crusade against health and safety regulations endangers workers, hobbles the environmental justice movement, and sets the stage for our next public health crisis | Economic Policy Institute

Public Ownership and Worker Co-operatives

The best way to counteract the power of the wealthy capitalist elites is to not give them the power that private ownership of the means of production gives them The best way to do that is to turn that ownership over to the actual workers that, to put it obviously, use the means of production to produce, whether that is things, services or information. The best way to do that is through worker co-operatives.

Worker cooperative - Wikipedia

What is a Worker Cooperative

History of Worker Cooperatives

Canadian Worker Co-op Federation

U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives

That being said, there are situations where centralized public control is preferable for strategic national interests, such as the creation of a nationwide electricity grid, or a nationwide electrified rail system, although I am sure there are others. There may be other sectors where a public presence, but not dominance, is desirable, including a public broadcaster, a public renewable energy agency and likely others.

Universal Basic Income

Capitalism’s secret (well maybe not so secret) weapon is maintaining a level of unemployment that forces workers to take underpaid exploitative employment. Universal Basic Income is the counterbalance to that. While Universal Basic Income does not deter people from seeking employment it empowers then to refuse to be exploited.