The fatal flaw in the author's argument, and in the argument of Doran and Klein whom he cites, is that in purporting to criticise "capitalism" they do not distinguish between private and public ownership or control of the means of production. This failure is fundamental and makes the entire argument nonsense.

You can see, can't you, that if agriculture were collectivised a la the dream of Lenin, it would be meaningless nonsense to impute the resulting mass starvation to "capitalism"?

Well? At what stage has the author, or Doran or Klein, made the fundamental distinction on which their entire argument rests?

For example, take the aggressive wars of the USA. These are wars carried out by the State, using the power of the State, funded by its monopoly power of taxation, and by its assumed monopoly power of controlling the money supply, in reliance on the monopoly military power of the State. They involve forcing the whole the population to pay non-consensually for the State to control the means of producing war in the State's unilateral discretion. If you don't agree with it, you don't have an option to withhold payment, as you do in voluntary transactions. If you try withholding payment, the State will send its armed agents to arrest you, and if you don't submit or defend yourself, they'll beat you into submission or shoot you or cage you. It simply gibberish to think of this as "capitalism". It's the opposite!

The corporate military-industrial complex is entirely State-funded, a State phenomenon. The fact that private corporations are more efficient at doing anything than the State, including make weapons, does not prove the author's point. It only proves that if the State wants "more bang for the buck" (the concept of efficiency as expressed by the State) it contracts out to private businesses.

Thus the author and his ilk are hoist with their own petard. Their critique of capitalism only stands up if you define capitalism to mean "State ownership and control of the means of production based on the State’s claimed monopoly of coercion" - the exact opposite of the meaning of capitalism which refers to private control of the means of production based on market i.e. consensual transactions. That’s what the whole issue is about, dummy! And you missed it with your undergraduate boilerplate critique of capitalism quoting Lenin!

No school of economic thought refers to itself as “neoliberal”. This is used entirely by socialists and Keynesians as a term of abuse referring incoherently to refer to anything they don’t like, without taking care to distinguish the critical variables, of private versus government ownership and control of the means of production.

The idea that the massive governmental junketing in Iraq shows anything other than massive GOVERNMENTAL junketing just shows complete confusion. To make his case, the author would need to show that, in the absence of government interventions either in the USA or Iraq to bring about such results, such expenditures on such things would have resulted anyway from the free movement of capital in free markets – the opposite of what he’s arguing.

The author’s confusion is laughable and if you follow his line of reasoning to its logical conclusion you see it at its height: “government is controlled by wicked corporations therefore we need more government”!

If the left wing had not spent the last century urging for government’s endless and open-ended expansion of government power to control the economy, we would not have the results that government power is inter-riddled with every aspect of corporate life that they are now rightly complaining about.

The solution is more liberty, not more monopoly fascist socialism. Complying with the Constitution would be a start. Underneath the author’s confusion, in his just complaint, he agrees with Ron Paul.

The world would be a far better place if it got rid of capitalism entirely.

A world that is built upon worshiping greed above all else is disgusting. Greed makes pigs of us all, turns us into money-grubbers and whores who have no depth of character or nobility!

The rich should be taxed out of existence. They should be replaced by philosophers and artists and playwrights and humanitarians, people who have something valuable to offer to the world.

And the "philosophers and artists and playwrights and humanitarians" would decide what to produce and how and who for?

David G is showing why attempts to replace capitalism with a better system, killed over 200 million people in the last century.

Dreamers are all very well but when their dreams are backed up with a monopoly of lethal aggressive force it tends to turn out worse than bad.

David G always has the option of not buying and selling stuff, since voluntary exchanges are so wicked, but then he wouldn't be tryping stuff into his computer made by those wicked capitalists, would he?

Clearly the author of the book has an extreme left/passifist view of world history which, like most extreme views, results in egregious errors. The statement about capitalists profiting from war, for example, is fundamentally mistaken. Some sections of the private sector profit from war. Otherwise much normal economic activity shuts down. America had good reasons for entering World War I (although how this got dragged into the argument I do not know) including German insistence on torpedoing American ships. To claim it was to make the world safe for capitalism is simply absurd.

David G's complaints about greed are a throw back to the days of the hard left. If he can suggest an alternative that does not result in a basket case economy, I'd be interested to hear it..

Ken McNab troops out the tired old todge that capitalism means war. By implication, Ken must be a socialist dinosaur. He must have lived for the past twenty years in a time warp, unaware that the world's premier Socialist states gave up on his beloved Socialism long ago. They finally figured out that the capitalists were right all along. Praising abject failure while attacking spectacular success is a difficult job, but Ken is doing his best.

Ken claims that the USA is conducting wars of imperialism. That's funny. The USA once conquered Japan, Italy and Germany and the last I heard, they were still independent countries with their own foreign policy which was often at adds with their American conquerors. If Ken want s to make a point, backing up his arguments with "facts" which everybody knows is just nonesense is not the way to do it. But reasoned argument and logic has never been strong points with the true believing Socialist.

The funniest thing about Ken's argument is how he and his fellow trendy lefty friend Daemon Singer contradict each other on US motives for war. Ken sneers that the USA is into war because war is a "racket" which is very profitable. While Singer claims that two wars that the USA was involved in recently sent the USA bankrupt.

C'mon boys. You have to get your reflexive anti Americanism straight. Either the US is into war because it is profitable, or it is not. Could you two fight this premise out between you and come back to OLO when you can both agree on an a generally agreed anti American argument