The premise of this entire post is based upon a few common illusions.

The first illusion is that progress in the west is a result of "free market" capitalism. No. We have not been running some purified version of capitalism all these years. We have been running a corrupt capitalism based on the genocide of millions of native American people. We stole an entire continent with basically unlimited resources, killed off the millions who inhabited it, brought a slave wage force from Africa on which to build our industrial revolution, then when that was over we replaced it with wave after wave of immigrant populations from Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South America.

This recent surge in capitalistic splendor you refer to since 1981 corresponds with the move to importing goods made in countries with their own slave labor forces. Now we shop at massive corporate big box stores which use supply chains that save money by operating warehouses in coutries with abysmal human rights policies. Walmart and Lowes have gotten the most recent press, but any corporation that is scrutinized will show the same thing. And they are selling products like iPhones which are also being produced with slave labor. If that isn't bad enough our corporations are also using slave labor in a for-profit prison system to produce goods domestically.

Your "free market" is a fairytale - an illusion used to make the obscene palatable.

And it gets worse. Much worse. Now look at the military industrial sector of the economy where the banks, in order to prop up the US dollar value have been funding oil wars in the middle east for decades, making contractors and weapons manufactures rich at the cost of countless millions of civilian lives and human misery on an unprecedented scale.

You might want to take a few minutes to consider where your charts and graphs are coming from and why. Even what numbers that have any shred of validity are overlooking the millions who died to make them possible. It's all a load of crap.

Is capitalism better than socialism? It's a false question. Capitalism by itself is awful. Capitalism by itself is the wealthiest crushing everybody else. Same thing for socialism. Socialism and capitalism together with an informed populace and a conscientious government can use socialist type laws to protect the rights of workers and oversee corporations so that they aren't allowed to do what they otherwise would do if left unregulated. If corporations and the wealthy are taxed properly and FORCED to play fair, then capitalism can be FORCED to yield fair results for a population a la the 1950s and 1960s but that is not the normal way of things.

Capitalism is not some "new thing." It has been around basically since the invention of money and has presented in some form in all parts of the world ever since. Unfortunately all that time we have also had corruption, and corruption takes capitalism and creates human misery in exchange for the profits of the wealthy, whether that be Dutch trading costers, Roman gladiator houses, Taiwanese merchant lords, or African slave markets.

For the love of God almighty, wake up.

All of these corporations paid lower tax rates than I did over the last decade, and IN ADDITION TO THAT, they got money back, as in paid by me to them (thanks to the corrupt government that enforced it):

■ AT&T ($38.1 billion)
■ Wells Fargo ($31.4 billion)
■ JPMorgan Chase ($22.2 billion)
■ Verizon ($21.1 billion)
■ IBM ($17.8 billion)
■ General Electric ($15.4 billion)
■ Exxon Mobil ($12.9 billion)
■ Boeing ($11.9 billion)
■ Procter & Gamble ($8.5 billion)
■ Twenty-First Century Fox ($7.6 billion)
■ Time Warner ($6.7 billion)
■ Goldman Sachs ($5.5 billion)

Here are some companies who paid zero in taxes from 2008 to 2015:

Pepco Holdings
PG&E Corp.
Wisconsin Energy
NiSource
International Paper
FirstEnergy
Priceline.com
Amos Energy
General Electric
American Electric Power
Ryder System
Duke Energy
NextEra Energy
Xcel Energy
Ameren
CMS Energy
Sempra Energy
Eversource Energy

Meanwhile I am required by the US government to purchase liability insurance (rather than insuring my own vehicle). I am required to pay for corporate health insurance. I am required to pay for 8 ongoing military conflicts at the cost of 1 mill per bomb and these wars are not based on the consent of my representatives in Congress.

This is what happens. It always happens. It has always happened, and it always will happen because people are easy to trick, especially if you threaten to label them as unpatriotic or as welfare recipients. Unlike human beings, however, corporations do not have the slightest objection to taking welfare. They will take as much as they can pay our representatives to give them. That last list is companies who paid zero taxes from 2008 to 2015. They paid nothing.

Corruption isn't good when it's capitalism and it isn't good when it's socialism.

In fact, it's the opposite way around: Capitalism is great when it's the utopian ideal version of capitalism. Same for socialism. But NEITHER ONE is ever the case, and in the real world all economic models are converted by corruption into misery machines unless people use common sense and compromise to step in and stop it from happening. That requires information, morality, and moderation.

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