Capitalism is a casino. Has always been a casino. And it has brought more people out of poverty worldwide than any other economic system before or since. The best gamblers make a lot of money, the rest fold their hands and lose all their chips. The American worker should care; his/her retirement depends on that stock market. But you're right, Americans generally don't care....they sit back fat, dumb and happy and then panic when the stocks crash and they lose that retirement. What happened?... I dunno... maybe should have been paying attention?????
Back in 2008 I watched as friends lost half the value of their 401's. It meant some could never retire. My wife handles our money. She had most of it invested in Chinese related stocks, so we didn't get burned in that crash. She's always been smart with money. Our ROTH is one of our main sources of income. She follows the market closely, which means I don't have to. Often she's glued to that market app on her laptop and/or IPad. She says no one will watch your money as close as you will. I guess she's not an "average working American".
Most reasonable people realize Capitalism must be well regulated, especially to keep the playing field level. But if you don't like Capitalism, what system do you think is better? Right now we do have some problems to work out with Capitalism; we are in the midst of a technology revolution, and technology usually favors capital over labor. We see this globally. But we need to be very careful what policies we adopt; we might not like the consequences. Especially the unintended consequences.
Why are you attempting to turn me into a hater of capitalism when you know better?
First, I said that
Wall Street is a pure casino.
That doesn't mean that I think that the concept of a capitalist stock market is bad, it means that I think it needs to be run a lot better than the average casino, and in this day and age it is a Trump casino, and that does not bode well at all if past history is any indicator.
And even the casinos have better regulations than Wall Street.
To paraphrase Meatloaf, if money truly is LOVE, then what I am attempting to say is, there needs to be a point at which it's right to say
"I'll do anything for "LOVE", but I won't do that."
(And money isn't love, but for Donald Trump, it is. Just an aside...He literally WILL do ANYTHING for money.)
The best gamblers make a lot of money and the rest fold their hands and lose their chips?
Sorry, but there's a whole lot more to running an economy than just throwing our hands up in the air and saying "Welp, them's the breaks, tough luck" because while Wall Street may be big on gambling, for millions of working families and small business owners
(and I mean actual SMALL businesses, not WSJ definition, which includes Apple, Inc.) this is not a gamble, and those people NEED PROTECTION from the more rapacious aspects of the great big casino.
If you're 100% dyed in the wool anarcho-capitalist, then unfortunately that's a gap I can't cross.
We have fire regulations for a reason. Capitalism is a lot like fire, and while fire is a very useful tool, at times it can be hazardous to tangle with, thus we have those fire safety regulations.
So while you may
(if you're anarcho) see nothing wrong with smoking around the gas pump and lighting matches to check the fuel level in the tank, or while you might say "them's the breaks", I see a need for some common sense regulation and ethics.
And by the way, make no mistake about it, the technology revolution that you speak of is going to eventually make a vast swath of human labor, even skilled labor, irrelevant and obsolete. There's your unintended consequences.
So while you're talking about how great your ROTH is, that's wonderful for you but it's an awfully narrow way to look at how the rest of our society is forced to make do.
A Roth IRA, yeah sure...lots of Americans have that, and even more do not.
And it's not because "most Americans are lazy" or "made poor choices"...our economy has been making poor choices ever since we threw the middle class overboard forty-something years ago in favor of catering to the CEO class.
And for the average working American family, that forty year Wolf of Wall Street wet dream has translated into a lower quality of life despite productivity increases that boggle the mind.
And that's why most Americans don't care.
It's not because they are "fat, dumb and happy" as you say, but because they are not a part of that economic class and see no way forward for them to ever BE part of it.
Hey, we're all glad your retirement is all figured out but the "I got mine, screw you" approach not only isn't working, it's starting to piss off the birds on the bottom rung, who are sick and tired of being crapped on.