Word: socialistic
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Capitalists also have produced a far greater quantity and variety of consumer goods and services than socialist central planners. The reason: for all its weaknesses, the market functions as a superbly adaptive super-computer that continuously monitors consumer tastes. Says Walter Heller: "The private market makes trillions of decisions without any central regulation. It is a fantastic cybernetic device that processes huge amounts of information in the form of the consumer voting with his dollars, the retailer telegraphing back to the wholesaler, the wholesaler to the producer...
...Canada and Australia grow enough not only to feed their own peoples but also to export huge surpluses. In contrast, the Soviet Union?although 30% of its workers labor on its vast farmlands?has to import food. So does India, which permits private farming but insists out of socialist principle that the produce be sold at unrealistically low prices...
...little early to write off capitalism. The system has survived wars, depressions, the loss of colonial empires?even the accession to government power, in such countries as Britain, France and Germany, of parties that called themselves socialist but proved unable or unwilling to dismantle the system...
Today, ironically, the strength and adaptability of capitalism are appreciated most by fervent socialists who would like to destroy the system but realize they are nowhere near their goal. New Left Philosopher Herbert Marcuse denounces capitalism's profit motive as "obscene" but concedes that it is so powerful that the downfall of capitalism "is not imminent." Michael Harrington, the pre-eminent American socialist, concedes that capitalism "has shown remarkable resiliency" and predicts that it "will spend and plan its way out of the present situation...
...which economists have given such cacophonous names as "stagflation," "slumpflation," "infession" and "inflump." Breaking that inflation-recession cycle is rapidly becoming the major problem, not only of capitalism, but of democracy. Inflationary recession is more likely than anything else to make voters turn to an authoritarian fascist or socialist system that would fix price, production and employment levels by fiat, and permit no argument...