re: Our Constitution
We agree up to a point:
The key is to realize that the ideal form of government is one that allows the individual the maximum freedom to deal with other individuals on a voluntary basis, restricted from using force or fraud (the latter being the minimal role of government.)
But as I observed, Americans have exercized their freedom to voluntarily adopt other economic systems besides capitalism. It seems that Capitalism, like Communism (both in their capital "C" usage) can't tolerate the existence of a competing system and try to destroy the other. That in itself is a violation of the principle of freedom of choice.
One of the basic problems when talking about economic systems is the phenomenon of scale. Adam Smith described a very fine-grained system, composed of individual merchants and tradesmen who did deal with each other face-to-face, and had wide latitude in their decisions. Small "c" communism has worked on a small scale in communes in America and Israel and elsewhere, in large part because the individuals participated voluntarily.
History shows that neither system has scaled up well. Small "c" communism became Communism with formal mechanisms of central control. Small "c" capitalism became Corporate Capitalism, which divorced the individual from direct participation in a face-to-face transaction, and created an imbalance of power that undermined the individual's freedom to choose and participate on a strictly voluntary basis. Corporate Capitalism has not only distorted the level playing field in the marketplace, but because it also controls most employment, has caught the individual between a rock and a hard place. The corporation giveth, and the corporation taketh away. Few individuals today get to participate as equals in the economy.
So all that stuff about the shape of the curve is about deviation from the ideal of voluntary and equal participation in the marketplace. Adam Smith's fine grained economy centered on the individual must have had a very linear distribution of wealth. The kinks in the curve, particularly the hyperbolic trajectory at the upper end that we see today, describe imbalances of power.
Monopolies are a vivid example of players who distort the curve, and anti-trust laws are an attempt to restore linearity. That's why I said that the basic legal framework around business is benign, because proper regulation should reinforce linearity. Sure, there have been excesses in government control, but damn, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater! Pure laissez-faire capitalism would last about a day until runaway imbalances produce oligarchy.
I'm saying that capitalism could use some reform to preserve it, not that it needs to be replaced. I think that the pro-big-business stance of the Republican Party is exactly the wrong direction to go.