Statistics about unemployment are not enough to sway me, I’m afraid — slavery was a system in which there was full employment, but it wasn’t all that great for those employed. What impressed me about Simon’s analysis of the economic state of the US was that he talked about people, not about numbers — profits or statistics or so on.

And I’m also sceptical about the idea that capitalism is the answer to the world’s problems, simply because we do not practice pure capitalism; the socialism of the twentieth century changed the economic landscape in which we function fundamentally. I am also very sceptical about economic theories that assume that the world is a level playing field; it isn’t. A Bahamian can’t invest in the major industry of our country the same way a multinational resort developer can, and the result is that while a place like Atlantis may provide employment for many people, it also disenfranchises those people as well. They become servants/quasi-slaves in their own land. This is what the “market” allows, because the richest and the most powerful in a global sense have the ability to set prices, control the markets, and reap the profits.

I’m not saying we should ban anything — only that I am sceptical of any philosophy that suggests that something invented — like the “market” will level playing fields. It’s not true; behind the “market” are people, and each one is as greedy as the last.

But on another note. I had a conversation with someone else about this very subject, and observed that it’s difficult to talk about capitalism in any pure sense, as the twentieth century was fundamentally a socialist century. Marx and Engels were not wrong in their theory about industrial society. Labour does have far more power than it was led to believe, and it is the foundation on which industry was built. What failed was the totalitarian spin put on that theory by megalomaniacs like Stalin (not to mention the world revolution idea put forward by Trotsky), and the fact that it was easier to follow the Stalinist model than to challenge it with other forms of socialism. I would argue that there is no modern state that has not been impacted by, or implemented elements of, the socialist revolution. It was socialism, not capitalism, that made work comfortable for the worker — in capitalist societies the trade unions did that job (and some still do).

I am not against entrepreneurship, which is different from what I understand to be capitalism. Capitalism in my mind is as much the enemy of entrepreneurship as socialism is; WalMart, which puts mom and pop drugstores out of business wherever it arrives, or even Starbucks, to which I am partial, are capitalism unleashed in my understanding — and the principles of capitalism that govern them do not make room for the individual or the person (except so far as it’s necessary in the interests of good public relations). Capitalism has not yet proven to be the solution to poverty. Global corporations are as committed to creating poverty in the USA (see former industrial towns whose companies have outsourced their production) as socialism ever was.