Ok, friends. I want to tell you something interesting I learned about socialism about a decade ago. Ready?

We actually have Karl Marx to thank for capitalism. Reading his work on socialism inspired Adam Smith to invent the theory of capitalism. Wealth of Nations was Smith's answer to Marx.

Marx argued that, for a society to prosper, the means of production should be collectively owned by laborers.

Smith argued that said means should be owned by entrepreneurs, who then rewarded laborers according to their contributions.

Socialism and capitalism are basically two sides of the same coin: economic freedom from a feudal system. Both men saw how monarchs impoverished countries by demanding wealth for themselves at the expense of the people who generated said wealth.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Smith believed that natural market forces (supply & demand) would determine the value of a worker's labor, & the business owner would reward the worker according to that value. If they didn't, the worker could unionize, strike, etc.

Smith was also anti-monopoly. While he invented the term laissez faire ("hands off"), he did believe in a basic level of government regulation to prevent monopolies.

Monopolies gave owners too much power & destroyed the very competition & innovation that made capitalism work.

Monopolies also made owners lazy. Instead of trying to create the best products for the best price, owners could cut corners to generate more profit for themselves.

At the dawn of the 20th century, America was experiencing a major movement toward socialism. Why? Because capitalism had gone in the exact direction Smith said it shouldn't. Workers were being underpaid & exploited. Owners were cutting corners. Monopolies were rife.

It sounds ho-hum when described that way, but people were actually dying. History tells of the infamous textile factory fire where hundreds of workers burned to death because the owner locked the (inward-opening) factory doors during working hours.

Owners were also doing things like putting sawdust in flour and lard into butter to cut costs. People practically rioted when Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle that rats and rusty nails were being ground up in people's sausage.

That time in history brought a wave of government regulations. Child labor was banned. Food & worker safety was instated. Unions popped up in nearly every industry. The government added the FDA, USDA, OSHA, and all kinds of agencies.

If you had to describe capitalism and socialism in single words, capitalism is about innovation, while socialism is about equity. One is an answer to the other. Anytime capitalism swings too far in the wrong direction, socialism comes along to rebalance it.

Adam Smith's original description of capitalism is actually far closer to socialism than what we currently have in the U.S....because it was built on Marxist ideas.

Both capitalism and socialism are theories about how best to build a country's wealth through worker empowerment.

Smith and Marx simply had different ideas about how to best empower workers.

It's really no surprise that, 115 years later, America is experiencing another major movement toward socialism. Wealth inequality has hit extreme levels. Monopolies rule. Many of our protective agencies have been gutted. Unions have been all but wiped out.

That's because capitalism and socialism suffer from the same fundamental weakness that all economic systems do: the ability of the ruling class to manipulate it.

There's a reason we've been fed so much anti-socialism propaganda in America: capitalists don't want to forfeit any power to the working class. They don't want to pay fair wages or abide by environmental protections or negotiate with unions or any of that other stuff.

The irony is, we might not even have capitalism if it weren't for Marx and his socialism. And capitalism without the equitable restraints of socialism simply collapses into oligarchy and kleptocracy and worse.

So if you enjoy your union and 40-hour workweek and weekends and OSHA-mandated PPE and worker's compensation and overtime pay and break times and non-adulterated butter and not competing with 10-year-olds for your job, thank a socialist.

Despite what capitalism's worshippers would have you believe, unrestrained capitalism does not lead to endless innovation. Unrestrained capitalism is a top-heavy system that drains wealth away from the consumer class until the whole thing collapses.