It's fascinating how you romanticize the idea of small family-owned businesses transforming into industrial giants, but your narrative conveniently ignores the reality of how America was truly built. Let's not forget that the foundation of the American economy wasn't laid by entrepreneurs alone but through the exploitation of countless others, including enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and exploited immigrant laborers.
Yes Henry Ford was a visionary, but he didn't operate in a vacuum. Ford benefited immensely from government contracts during both World Wars, government-subsidized infrastructure like roads and railways, and a workforce educated and maintained by public institutions. The mass production techniques Ford is famous for weren't just his invention, they were made possible by the efforts of thousands of workers whose labor was exploited for his private gain. Mass production is a social endeavor, not a private one.
The US government provided Ford with the legal framework, currency, and infrastructure that made large-scale industrial operations feasible. So, to argue that America was built "not by government" but by individuals alone is a capitalist fairytale.
Your glorification of these business icons also ignores how many of them stifled competition and innovation to maintain their market-share dominance. Capitalism isn't about fair play; it's about the private accumulation of wealth and power, often at the expense of the public good. The monopolistic practices and exploitation of workers that characterized the rise of these industrial giants are precisely why we need democratic socialism as a corrective force and eventually a better solution to mass production than market capitalism.
As for your assertion that the pursuit of profit leads to innovation, that's hardly the case. The pursuit of profit often leads to corner-cutting, environmental degradation, the suppression of new technology to avoid disrupting lucrative, well-established markets, and the engineered obsolescence of products, making them wear out and break within a certain time frame to force the consumer to purchase more of the product. All of this is in the name of maintaining the "bottom line".
The same fossil fuel companies that profit from gas-guzzling cars have lobbied against the development of modern, efficient public transportation systems that would benefit society as a whole. They've also lobbied members of the US Congress to make nuclear energy incredibly expensive and hence difficult to produce, to maintain America's dependence on oil, gas, and coal.
We have lobbyists for the private prison industry lobbying politicians to make more things illegal and sentences longer, all for the purpose of increasing their profits.
When you say capitalism is about individuals "risking everything" to turn an idea into a profitable business, you ignore the reality that in today's capitalism, the risks are disproportionately borne by the workers and the public, while the rewards are concentrated in the hands of a few. Workers are the ones who really risk for their employers (i.e. exploiters):
The truth is that capitalism has always relied on government support, whether through direct subsidies, favorable legislation, or military intervention to protect capitalist interests. Yet, when it comes to ensuring the well-being of the American public and its working class, capitalism fails miserably.
As technology advances, the contradictions of capitalism become even more apparent. Automation and AI threaten to eliminate almost all jobs, and without a social safety net or a plan to transition to a new economic model, we're heading toward a catastrophic crisis. Capitalism, which thrives on the exploitation of labor, becomes obsolete when that labor is no longer necessary. That's where democratic socialism steps in, to save the day. Democratic socialism is the future, and if Americans don't realize that yet, they will when advanced robotics and artificial intelligence, takes their jobs.
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