According to Adam Smith, he believes in gaining the greatest goods for the greatest number. He thinks that people should be allowed to freely pursue their own personal gain (selfish gains at times) with little restraints as possible.
I have no doubts that it is good for economical purpose as people will be extremely motivated to find a way to maximize own profits and thinking out of the box without any restriction to accumulate more wealth. But I believe that the greed of the people has made them exploit the system and nobody wants to share their wealth. It is like an endless pursuit to their desire of wealth and power.
Being in a competitive environment is good as people will push to their limits to increase productivity to try to eliminate fellow competitors.
Technological advances have caused some workers to be replaced by machines and this leads to a growing unemployment rate. Companies that have superior wealth and power can get these new technologies and thus reducing the need for workers. And they have the edge (cost saving over lesser workers needed for production in the long run and better productivity) over fellow competitors that will probably get booted out of the competition if they do not have the capital to follow suit.
The rich countries have the knowledge, network, political and military power. They exploited the ignorance and small network of the poor countries, by paying them poorly for their raw material and selling the finished goods at high prices. There are no fair trades at all as the rich abuses their superiority to trample all over the poor and hence the “poor” nations were made poor.
Karl Marx believes that the effective challenge would be revolution whereby it overturns the capitalist system to a system of common ownership for the common good, a system of pure communism. There will be a minimum wages for all workers, reduced working hours, banned child labor and improve the conditions and protections of workers everywhere.
I feel there will be a lack of motivation for the workers if there is a minimum wages for all workers. As workers might have this mentality that “Why should I work so hard since the minimum pay is the same for all workers?” This lack of competitive environment leads to lower productivity which in turns affects the economical benefit of the nation.
I think there will be lesser stress for people in communist society as they are less likely to be out of job and they get better or fair treatments.
I think government intervention is very important as they can try to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor within the nation. Having a capitalist economic structure to ensure economic growth and an active government to aid the disadvantaged population is a hybrid that I think it will work well for all different classes in the society. But I think more can be done if heavy taxes are imposed on those top earners who accumulated multi millions of net worth, have the cash to distribute to the poorer people.
Personal Opinion: Sometimes I wonder why do some individual want to accumulate so much wealth and do not want to share it with the poor/needy. Why not give back to the society? Our personal gain is probably someone’s loss.
