| Great comment. I agree with all of it, except your closing sentiment. It's evolving to become a place where goods and services previously only available to billionaires became available to millionaires and then became available to the middle class and then became available to the poor all over the World. In 1900, the US had 4,192 cars. 1681 ran on steam. 1575 were electric and 936 had an internal combustion engineer. Only the super rich and hobbyists had them. The Model T was released in 1908. On May 26th, 1927, 15 million Model T's had been produced. Today, 88 percent of Americans are drivers and there are 1.9 cars per household in a country of 321 million people. Furthermore, most of those without a car have access to buses and trains. One day we'll evolve to become a society where everyone will have access to on demand transportation as reliable as running water, available everywhere. Transportation isn't the only industry impacted by this evolution. Even the uninsured in America have access to more and better medical care than John D. Rockefeller did in his day. We can symbolically condemn capitalism until we go blue in the face, but the fact still remains that it is the only reason this planet is able to sustain 7.5 billion people at the current quality of life. 100, 200, 300 years ago plagues and famines were common and many suffered and died due to causes that fewer and fewer people in the present will ever have to worry about. Are all of the institutions produced by capitalism perfect? Far from it, but even those institutions have flaws that we can correct if, as a society, we're willing to put a price on them to incentivate some entrepreneur to solve it in the pursuit of profit. |