Joe said:
I don't see how capitalism, i.e. survival of the fittest' can not lead to income inequality.
Indeed, numerous authors (of course Proudhon and Marx or more recently Piketty and Hodgson) have described the positive correlation between capitalism and wealth inequalities. Many synergic factors are at work among which:
- access to capital: the capitalist can use his capital as collateral to get extra funding and invest, the worker can't use his work as collateral
- the capital is mobile, so the capitalist can quickly move to profitable markets, the worker due to its diplomas and professional experience is limited to a few industries
- the offspring of the capitalist has access to the best schools, districts, libraries, the offspring of the worker doesn't
- the capitalist is less taxed than the worker (see for example the restrictive access to tax heavens, of which the largest is Delaware)
All those factors point in the same direction: a major dis-balance between the power and retribution of the capital VS labor.
There's a danger of taking Peterson's competence hierarchy idea
Absolutely. Here is the main lie of capitalism: it is described as a meritocracy i.e. retribution is proportional to competences. Nothing could be further from truth.
I've witnessed this lie first hand while being at the bottom of the hierarchy (construction worker, industry worker) and quite high in the hierarchy (executive management, CEO).
My observations from those two very different professional circles lead me to think that, at least in 'high' circle, at best there is no correlation between competency and professional hierarchy, at worse the correlation is negative where the ones who "succeed" certainly exhibit plenty of manipulation, lies, predation, ambition and not much of the traits usually associated with competence: expertise, honesty, intelligence conscientiousness, experience, etc.
During the SOTU speech last month, Trump declared that America would "never be a socialist country"
Socialism and capitalism are meaningless words. Every country has its own definition. Gustave LeBon explained clearly why the "same" ideology varies so much from one country to another. In order to be accepted by the local population, ideologies have to be tailored to the cultural and anthropological specifics of each countries.
Combine LeBon with Lobaczewski idea of secondary ponerization (i.e. infiltration and deformation of an ideological movement by schizoids) and you can see how pathological elites tailor, country after country, a veneer of acceptability over their nefarious ideologies to get the agreement of the local population while behind the customized veneer lies the same schizoidal rot made of destruction and domination.
Back to Trump statement, the USA is not really a capitalist country (in the sense of "free market"), it is has socialist features. For example, there are numerous governmental bodies regulating the markets.
The FDA regulates pharmaceutical drugs approval. By setting a price of $100 million per clinical trial, it creates a capitalistic entry barrier and insures that only the pharmaceutical oligopolies get a share of the juicy pharmaceutical market (the veneer being to provide food and drugs safety).
The SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) is another governmental body supposed to regulate stock markets, while the SEC actually provides a veneer of legality and morality to Wall Street that remains the greatest temple of Ponzi schemes, money laundering and market manipulation in the whole world.
In this sense the USA, along with most "developed countries", gets the worse of "capitalism" combined with the worse of "socialism", I guess it is the hallmark of any highly ponerized country.