The Third Revolution: Creating Unprecedented Wealth and Happiness for Everyone in the New Millennium by Richard Koch

Author:Richard Koch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2008-05-28T12:27:00+00:00

Capitalism and democracy have had a checkered relationship. They have not been natural bedfellows. The economic system, at least up to 1945, benefitted society's most privileged elements, who often reaped more than they sowed. Capitalism was a system for capitalists. Increasingly, in the first half of this century, capitalism gave manifestly unfair rewards to capitalists. Capitalists became absentee industry-lords. Economically, managers became more important than capitalists. The capitalists retreated to the beach, the casino, the art-gallery, the charitable institute. In Russia and Germany, the managers, acting in concert with the state and in the name of democracy, seized power. Elsewhere, they flexed their muscles, creeping toward ascendancy.

I )emocracy, an egalitarian system run for the masses, could not tolerate capitalism, an inegalitarian system run for the few. A better system shimmered. Whether called communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, or - the best generic description - mana;erialism, a new economic system was on offer that promised to organize economics for the benefit of society as a whole rather than for the upper classes. That is why nearly all democrats took, or wanted to take, this road.

The road to hell was paved with democratic intentions. Between 1917 and 1941, capitalism's share of world economic systems, measured by value, fell from around 95 per cent to well below 40 per cent. By 31 December 1941, when the United States joined the European War, the United States and the British Empire were the only important states on earth that were still willing hosts of capitalism. A fi-ee press guaranteed that the intellectual consensus against capitalism gathered force even in the US and Britain. By 1941, few informed and intelligent observers expected, or wanted, to see capitalism survive.

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