Social-Capitalism

I have been thinking a lot lately about the idea of responsible capitalism personally I think from Westminster at the moment it is a lot of “Sound Biting” and an attempt to appease people with words they know but do not understand the meaning of, That said my ideal system would be what I would call the social-capitalist system where instead of kicking the free market with its size 90 boots the government could instead operate benevolent companies in the market place (For Example the BBC in Media, Northern Rock (had they not taken a massive loss to sell them) in banking, British Energy (Again had they not been sold) in the utilities) These companies which would by law have to strive to be profit making and would not be allowed to receive tax funding could then be used to provide a socialist element in a capitalist system.

This could include taking the unemployed on to provide skills and work experience (At
the same time making them work for their benefits) They could also ensure that price
fixing would be impossible as they would always look to lower end consumer prices whilst ensuring that there was still a level of profit to be made (Otherwise people would stop running businesses) and finally each company would provide a decent amount of money into the exchequer to remove a lot of the tax burden from the private sector. This way the government can manipulate the market rather than trying unsuccessfully to control it.

The important fact that seems to be lost of the protesters at St Paul’s is that unlike socialism and communism which try and control the way people behave to reach an ideological result capitalism is actually looking at things the other way as it does not try and change the way people behave but rather tries to explain the way people have behaved since society began, There is no way to abandon capitalism as it is our default setting and every attempt to move away from capitalism soon reverts to a close proximity to capitalism as people look to return to their natural behaviour, the challenge therefore is not to remove capitalism but to use it
to achieve the required aims, manipulate not devastate.