Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, in which all property is privately owned. Under capitalism the state is separate from economics, just as the state is separate from religion.

My roommate during my boarding school years was the great-grandson of the founder of Germany’s most famous private banking family. I vividly remember our night-long debates over communism versus capitalism. It was a popular topic during the Cold War years. He would favor communism and I would hold steadfast that the capitalistic system is the only sensible way to bring progress to the world.

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Those of us that can will have to re-start our economic engine and rebuild the wealth; but as long as we collectively believe that we are doomed, we will indeed live out a self-fulfilling prophecy…the sooner that we can focus on staking out the next frontier the faster we are going to get out of this.

The other day I learned a new phrase that was not part of my economics professor’s vocabulary: “the cascading economic downward spiral.”

What a profound way to describe our current economic condition. I leave it to your own imagination what exactly the term is trying to describe.

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