It really is this simple. American capitalism in its current form is failing the American people
That doesn't necessarily prove that Marxism would work better for most of us, but that isn't the point. Objectively, our form of capitalism is failing for most Americans. Failing the way that a liver fails, or a kidney fails. Failing the way eyesight fails. Our situation is deteriorating, things are getting worse and they have been getting progressively worse for a long time. There is a trend line, it's not just statistical noise, the trend in clear. Poverty is increasing, good paying jobs are becoming scarcer, the number of people who are surviving from pay check to pay check keeps growing. Fewer people can save for their retirement and more people are spending down savings that were once meant for retirement in order to just stay afloat.
The abstract merits and demerits of capitalism will always be debated, but pure capitalism is rarely practiced in the industrialized world, or anywhere else for that matter. We, like most nations, have a mixed economy. The stare has a role in our economy. The devil is in the details, in the mix, in the role that government plays. Few outside of the most extreme libertarians argue that the government has zero legitimate role in the economy. Even the ownership class wants some government involvement, but on their own terms of course. They want crop subsidies for corporate farmers.They want "investment friendly" tax loopholes for their favored industries. They want their trademarks and patents protected by the courts. They want their bank accounts to be federally insured. They want public education to provide workers with the minimal skills they expect from whatever work force they require, and they want federal, air flight controllers watching over their corporate jets etc.
While many in the ownership class would love to freely assemble monopolies so they can crush the opposition and subsequently gouge consumers, America already tried that social experiment and most of us weren't happy with the results. Back in the day a Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt, helped reign in the worst excesses of that unregulated system. Americans have long known and mostly agreed that unfettered, unregulated capitalism is a dangerous and potentially inhumane force. We once had no child labor laws, and children were exploited without mercy. We once had no worker safety laws and workers were endangered without mercy. Without a small army of government inspectors food safety was once routinely dangerously compromised in slaughterhouses and food processing plants across the nation. Why were such terrible business practices once embraced by many American capitalists? Simply because they were profitable and they helped the bottom line. Just like slavery once did also, another highly profitable American business practice that was only curtailed by government intervention. The free market would have let slavery continue for at least a few decades longer than it did.
The profit motive ia amoral. The competitive spur it provides for innovation and growth is at root no different than the incentive that the money armored cars carry provides to would be robbers of them. Morality is an overlay on the profit incentive that is not evenly applied. For some individuals their own internal moral compass has always prevented them from owning slaves, or recklessly endangering their workers, or selling rancid food, or from robbing banks, or from supplying steel to America's enemies during a time of war. .Clearly though not all moral compasses are created equal, as the history of capitalism (and crime) has shown.
When full time American workers can not afford to live even marginally on the wages that they earn, the capitalist system is not working for us. It may be working for the ownership class and the high ranking lieutenants that they employ, but not for the American people. Even beyond those minimum wage workers themselves, it is failing the entire shrinking middle class in more ways than one when millions of Americans can't earn a living wage. For those of us who live and work on "Main Street U.S.A." the economy is slowly grinding to a halt, whether we work for minimum wage or a half way decent salary; whether we have an employer or own our own small business. Money is draining out of our daily lives - there is less of it to go around in the circles that we live in. People can't spend what they don't have, and businesses can't sell what people can't afford to buy. It goes beyond that though. We are given a draconian choice. Either we, the people, must step in to mitigate the horror of what run-a-way unchecked capitalism is now doing to the American people. or we must allow our souls to calcify. Either we have to subsidize the uninsured in hospital emergency rooms through our taxes or turn a blind eye to their suffering and death. Either we, the people, have to put food on the table of hungry workers who can't earn enough to feed their families,through government assistance, or become indifferent to the hunger of children. Either we, the people, have to pay subsidies to ensure the availability of affordable housing for tens of millions of Americans who otherwise can't find it, or become numb to stepping past homeless elders and vets huddled in doorways and sleeping in parks under a blanket of newspapers.
God knows there is money in America, trillions of it, and it isn't disappearing, wealth is actually growing, but it is increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. For that lucky oligarchy, capitalism is working for America. For the rest of us it is failing, and for many of us it has already failed completely. The question isn't whether or not capitalism is or isn't good in any of its possible forms, relative to whatever alternatives to it there may be. The question is whether this form of capitalism, the way it is operating in America today, is good for the American people. Increasingly the answer is a clear and simple no.
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