I am sick of being treated less than human

[AZ Progressive]

70. Why can't people think beyond the capitalism - communism spectrum?

I mean, it's like people who dream up aliens can't think of any non-human or non-animal like form. Is it really that hard?

This country has a history of not liking "big government", but how can the people be protected against predatory capitalism if it isn't for big government?

Can we not have both big government and predatory capitalism?

What this is all really about is not allowing certain people to attain so much power as to be able to prey upon other people.

The only way I see to that is a reformed culture, an American culture that uses the power of strong disapproval / ostracism to make sure that noone has disproportionate power and noone's abusing their power. Anyone trying to gain disproportionate power or large sums of money (more than what is deemed appropriate for a professional) is worthy of scandal. Since business and attaining power is dependent on other people, people would just boycott anyone trying to attain such power. We would have no large businesses, only small businesses, small business partnerships, and small business collectives (for mainly the purpose of collective buying and working on things that require large scale productions, like airplanes) that are prohibited from lobbying and must function in a democratic way to its members. We would have virtual wealth caps (like we did when the U.S. had a top tax rate of 91% on the highest earners.) The small business focus would allow enough competition to keep prices fair, and if any group of businesses tries to price gouge people, there would be an uproar, followed by enough small businesses to take advantage at the foolhardy attempt to price gouge that they would take business away from them, so there would be virtual price caps enforced by society. And of course, because of the large amount of small businesses, there would be much more demand for workers and workers would have more power because they would simply just go with the employer that pays better and treats their workers better. And of course we still need the government to enforce certain rules and regulations (though I think that regulations should be funded as a collective administrated by the government, otherwise it favors businesses with more money.) In effect, its a rules based money economy, but with society doing much of the enforcing rather than the government. In this way, the wealth would be much more equally distributed but without a big government needed.

We must discourage legally and culturally the attaining of lots of power. We actually did this with wealth and power before with the top tax rate of 91% and the enforcing of antitrust laws that made it hard for companies to merge that until Reagan's DOJ first laxed the antitrust laws and thus allowed lots of companies to merge with each other. Before then, you would only have regional department stores, banks, and supermarket chains, not really national ones.