The current system is capitalism. The degradations are part of capitalism in practice. If you only accept categories that are theoretically pure, you cannot speak about the real world.
Governments have been increasing their regulation and redistribution for over a hundred years now, yet we still call the system "capitalism". At what point will we agree that the Western nations have either blended or socialist systems?
> At what point will we agree that the Western nations have either blended or socialist systems?
A good line in the sand would be: whenever a government spends more of its revenue on social transfers than on the legislative, military, and judicial branches combined, it's either a blended or a socialist form of government.
I think we all agree that western nations do not have some kind of pure form of libertarianism. That's why we call it capitalism, and not libertarianism.
How much government regulation, redistribution, and ownership is required before we call it socialism? I am not saying that socialism or mixed systems are bad, but I would like the system we are in to be accurately described.
It seems that many of the bad things which occur are ascribed to capitalism, when they should be attributed to the mixed (or socialist) economy we actually inhabit in the west.
Nowadays the public expenditure of many European countries is above 50% of the GDP. This is, more than 50 cents of every monetary unit are being expropriated and distributed according to a central planning. Even for the US, the figure is around 40%.
