I don't think the word capitalism describes anything real that occurs in the real world. Once we call free-market economies just that free-market economies the whole baggage of Marx's description of those economies as capitalist just falls apart. The reason being is that free-market economies can have various levels of state control in what free markets can provide which is virtually everything. For example the Nordic economies are completely different to the American one. Trying to use the word capitalism for free market economies gets even stranger when you consider that some of the best free-market economies in the world at the moment from an investment point of view are based on Communist systems where there is a high level of state control ,limited democracy but free markets over those areas of the economy those countries decide to develop.

Starvation in all Western economies has been pretty much overcome. Exploitation? It's a state of mind and when you look at small businesses in the UK for example, yes the owners are making more money than those who work for them but they also are risking a lot more and houses are often put on the line. Exploitation arguments are completely nonsense because it is not about taking off the rich, which has been the great flagship of the left since the beginning of the world, but raising up the standard economically and socially of those who are less better off which is what they have done in Nordic countries and who are not so preoccupied with stifling entrepreneurship and taxing the rich out of existence.

Poverty is a tricky one because there isn't actually a standard for it and all the measures of relative poverty are quite different. To some the fact that there are rich people and people who have nowhere near that amount of money automatically puts the less well-off into the poverty box. Again I do not agree with that because it is about raising up the standards of living for the less well-off no matter how rich people are. Chasing rich people to get more money out of them is a red herring, for people of left-wing persuasion very red, and what should be happening is encouraging an even bigger entrepreneurial class but one which is prepared to pay for and develop every citizen in society from the most talented to the most handicapped.I have a personal stake in the handicap bit because there are several jobs at the moment that I cannot do which I could if I did not have a handicap.

Private wealth going hand-in-hand with public squalor? Sure it does but a lot of people have short memories about how many Communist countries had public wealth going hand-in-hand with public squalor. It just seems way too convenient to try to right all the wrongs in terms of assuming that private wealth and public wealth are antagonistic. A much better way, a spiritual way, is for the poor, the middling bunch and the well-off to share a view that all human beings should have a good life no matter how rich or poor and implement legal as well as institutional means to ensure that. We will always have poor people, we will always have inequality because nobody is equal. I am as thick as two short planks but I blow a mean harmonica. Mr Fletcher is as bright as a button but could not blow the blues if someone held a gun to his head. Horses for courses but we have to look after all the horses to an acceptable minimum and place no limit whatsoever on the maximum potential human beings intellectually or economically can achieve. Bill Gates after all is very rich but like it or lump it he is giving it all away! I think that proves my point. If one can do it it is only a matter time before they all do.

The main problem in the world today economically and socially is the lack of global coordination in those two areas so every citizen of the world gets working, gets what they need and contributes to the whole. Until we human beings establish a World Government to coordinate those things which need coordinating at a world level these problems of market dislocations overproduction and under production will just keep going on. Something to slightly worry about is that there is still a profound belief that the nationstate on its own can do it all. In a world which is now contracted essentially to a neighbourhood that is not possible so we do indeed have to: Love Thy Neighbour and provide the institutional arrangements at the global level so that can occur.