Income inequality? Some people get more money than others because they are smarter or work harder.

Cooperation among political parties? The next thing you know, you have one big party. Think China.

The more politicians are sidelined, the better.

It has been proven beyond any doubt that too much of a good thing is no good !
Capitalism would work great with a benevolent Dictator at the helm.
As things stand, exploitation reigns supreme & many who work hard get fleeced down to nothing & the parasites in society work like Hell to prevent decency from the Domino effect.
And, so the undemocratic tax system will continue.

When Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations" he proposes that wealth is created in three ways: Capital, Labour or Rent.

At the time collective bargaining of labour was illegal and even though he had a distrust of guilds, master tradesman were restricted by law in how many people they could employ.

Certainly his ideas about trade lead to the rise in influence of the British Empire and as a result the United States.

What he did not envisage was a government making the decision to use both the public Capital (of natural resources) and Rent (from mining interests) to set up Sovereign Wealth Funds as Norway has done.

In Australia the mining lobby groups have been spreading the idea that increasing royalties will make Australia less competitive and the mines will be forced to shut.

Scare mongering at its finest.

Smith had a deep distrust of lobby groups or factions.

According to Smith, this would make Norway less competitive and as a result force buyers to look elsewhere for resources.

This has clearly not happened.

There are no longer any "new" lands left to colonise.

One of may favourite quotes from Smith is:

"The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

Capitalism? Yes, but not the extremely exploitive, servant master capitalism/slave wages servitude, preferred by callous and indifferent US Republicans, welded to idiotic ideological imperatives.

But rather cooperative capitalism, that as, vastly more productive co-ops, remained the only private enterprise, free market business model that survived the Great Depression largely intact. Even as giant multimillion enterprises went to the wall.

It's not logics rites that wanted to dismantle co-ops but giant corporations that simply could not compete! And so, they had their spit lickle, brown nosing, political lackeys do it for them.

We are now almost the single democracy that does not subsidise food production. Sure, co-ops needed a bit of a kick up the backside to get them to modernise and streamline their operations. And there should have been healthy and generous schemes to make that happen as best practice whole industries could follow!

Conservatives don't want co-ops because they harm their political masters, i.e., the big end of town.

Labor because they don't need union involvement and generally pay better wages and provide superior conditions.

We need something like a nuclear power party that isn't owned by the big end of town or the union bosses. To encourage the emergence of co-ops serving/supplying myriad niche markets the world over!

We need to get away from two-tiered capitalism that creates a shrinking cohort of haves and an expanding cohort of have nots! And return Australia to the egalitarian society that once was the envy of the world.

We know how to do it, we have the formula, that once made this nation a nation that enjoyed unprecedented post war prosperity and economic growth!
Alan B.

Capitalism can only work to its design when controlled by Flat Tax !

"We need to get away from two-tiered capitalism that creates a shrinking cohort of haves and an expanding cohort of have nots!"

Agree, if a society is to have some degree of egalitarianism, then unrestrained Capitalism is not the answer. A mixed economic system which embraces the best aspects of Capitalism, with its innovation of entrepreneurial skills creating wealth in society, tempered with the social justice benefits of Socialism, is the "ideal" in my view.