On Friday, Arianna joined US News & World Report editor Mort Zuckerman and Time's Fareek Zakaria on CNN's Your Money to talk about the best way to fix capitalism.
In a segment called "Capitalism: On Trial," host Ali Velshi asked each panelist to name the best solution they'd heard for repairing America's battered system.
Arianna said she would look to a businessman, a professor, and a judge for solutions. The businessman is Jim Stengel, former global marketing head of Procter & Gamble, whose book "Grow" focuses on "the need for business to align their bottom line with the social impact they're having."
The professor is Roger Martin, a University of Toronto professor, whose book "Fixing The Game" proposes that the "shareholder value theory" has wrongly "put traders rather than customers at the center of business decisions."
The third person is prominent judge Jed S. Rakoff, who "has the gumption to go out there and say that the double standard" America uses to hold corporations accountable "has to end."
Zuckerman said he would focus on overhauling the country's education system to prepare students for a "world in which education and technology is going to be enormously predominant." Zakaria said the U.S. economy is based "overly on consumption," and must focus more on investments in human and physical capital.
Watch the segment below:
Adam Smith would be appalled and dismayed at Capitalism as it is now practiced.
19th century western economists, those who defined the principles of Capitalism and its efficacy in the industrial revolution also acknowledged a need for successful practitioners of wage-labor enslavement to at least give back most of their gains "for the social good". Hence the birth of modern philanthropy.
And, Adam Smith himself recognized, as did Karl Marx, the tendency of Capitalism to suffer endemically from declining rates of profit during the most robust economic expansions, leading inevitably to recession (and sometimes depression).
Yet we continue to distract ourselves day in and day out with the same worthless ideas that got us here and futile pastimes.
Yet over and over again we've been assured that we can have that kind of 'growth' in the economy. Both sides use unsustainable levels of growth (and consumption) as their very definition of 'recovery'. But that it the level of thinking that created bubble after bubble, one boom and bust cycle after another.
That's the very broad solution. Finer grain solutions entail decentralization of political and economic power ... making economic decisions more locally or at least regionally as opposed to large centralized planning and top-down management.
Individually, people also have to come to terms with the same which always boils down to living within your means.
Our Institutions of higher learning, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, etc. were designed by Protestants and Deists for Protestants and Deists. Our Institutions of higher learning have experienced a diminish quality of education since there are fewer and fewer Protestants and more and more non-Protestants attempting to teach more and more non-Protestant students. They cannot reach the level of superiority once appreciated. Our country is in decline because our education is in decline. Our country, once number one in education, has been greatly diminished because we have been much too generous to ingrates who were not qualified for the demands of our great institutions.
We should take back our institutions of higher learning and restore them to what they were before we allowed whining ingrates who thought they were 'entitled' to go to our institutions of higher learning for which they were unqualified. We have suffered the consequence of that colossal mistake! Our schools will also be restored once our teachers are exposed to a 'very good' education' again!
A professor at Yale called Charles Dickens and Shakespeare anti-Semitic. Sad, Sad, Sad! I weep for my country and institutions of higher learning!
1. allow for individuals to write off travel/vacations for the next 2 years on their federal taxes.
2. increase 179 deductions for equipment to 5 million this year
3. allow for any us expansion of facilities to be deductible 100% the first year up to any amount for 2 years (so if proctor and gamble want to build a new plant, they can take it out of this years bottom line)
4.allow individuals to write off "help" that they hire, this saves the individual taxes and makes it hard for the cash workers to not pay their own taxes.
5. let folks write off 100% the cost of a remodel this year on their personal homes from their federal taxes. gets construction going immediately, and increases local governments tax rolls
big business and the have mores really don't deserve any more incentives to invest in our country...soon we will be paying them just to breath....while the rest of us struggle with lower pay, longer hours and no access to homes, education or health care....
write off travel and vacations? really? no doubt mr small manufacturing business owner you do business on all your travels and already write it off....that's what the elites do...the working class hasn't been able to afford travel or vacations for years...
Women spend the bulk of money for their families, yet we still have no say in laws that govern our very bodies. It is all done by men.
Women need jobs. They need them just as much as men because 63% of women do not recieve child support. Why do you just center on jobs for males???? What can be more important than having a job to support your family if the man has abandoned his resposibilities??? Children count in this world, if you ask me. Sometimes, they have nothing but their mother. Let's think of our future.