I see so many on here blaming capitalism for the problems we have today. The problem with this is that we don't have capitalism in the first place, we have corporate welfare.
Definition of capitalism from Miriam Webster
An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
That is not what we have, at least not in the US. When companies are bailed out by our tax dollars and deemed “too big to fail” that's not capitalism. When companies lobby to get laws changed in their favor, that's not capitalism. Especially when those changes don't apply to the broader market, and only benefit a select few within the market.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. That's all the word capitalism is in the US, it's the lipstick on the pig.
So instead of blaming, or even defending capitalism, when capitalism is clearly not what we have. This isn't an argument for, or against capitalism, because I too have no idea what true capitalism looks like because we don't have it. Maybe there's an argument that we did once have true capitalism in this country, but if that's the case, it ceased to exist before the 36 years I've been on this earth.
The word capitalism is similar to the CIA invented phrase of “conspiracy theorist” as a psychological operation to discredit citizens that claim to have seen or known differently than the story the government wants us to believe. You can actually look up what was told to the agents when it was invented. Similarly, they use the word capitalism to make people think and feel they have a system worth fighting for, because if they called it what it is, 'corporate welfare', no one would support it.
Now granted there may be no CIA documents on the word capitalism like there is on “conspiracy theory”, but the word is use in the same way as to misdirect people on what's really going on.