If Capitalism is Immoral what System of Economics is Moral?

[Mentat]

They had taxes in the Soviet Union as well.

That may be true, although a State that owns the means of production doesn't have that much to taxate... What did these taxes target?

Doesn't wage inequality benefit the wealthy by supressing prices for goods and services?

I don't understand this (supressing prices?).

This is called trickle down economics and was promted in the 1980s by tax breaks for the wealthy in the USA and UK (and no doubt other places too). Looking about us it does not seem to have aided the poor to a great extent if at all, I think because the beneficiaries didn't spend or save appropriately. I am inclined to think that had those governments retained the money and spent it on infrastructure investment instead more wealth would have been created across those societies as a whole.

Well, I do know that very similar measures are still used in Spain, but I have no formal economic training and ignore exactly how efficient and effective these measures are in real life. Investments in infrastructure might have been more beneficial, but surely the benefit would have been mostly for those able to benefit from said infrastructures? It certainly appears to be sound on paper. Getting the market to generate new jobs for the unemployed is clearly not something easy to do, but if the reason these people aren't well off is that they need jobs then the private sector must somehow be incentived to create it for them.

[Lummel]

Yes, it does seem strange doesn't it? The main tax as far as I can remember was something called the turnover tax which was a tax on sales.

Sorry, on the suppression of prices I was a little too brief. I mean that the lower the prices for goods and services are, the more that the wealthy can buy them. As a high percentage of the prices of goods and services is made up of wages, the lower the prices are the more that the wealthy in society can enjoy a benefit.

Infrastructure investment has an immediate benefit by creating jobs in constructing or upgrading infrastructure, but then there is a wider, long term benefit because there is a physical structure, such as roads, railways, port facilities or fiber optic cable that makes travel and trade easier and reduces cost of transportation for all business.

I am very comfortable in agreeing with you that the problem is with under-employment and unemployment and that the difficult task is encouraging jobs to be generated.