Herman Cain, an African-American businessman, literally worked his way from cleaning toilets to being a CEO over a major restaurant chain and a multi-millionaire.
In contrast, in socialist Venezuela right now, which due to its’ oil riches should be one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America – the people are rummaging through garbage dumpsters in a desperate search for food and the socialist government has advised the people to begin eating their pets.
Capitalism isn’t perfect, but its’ the best that we have right now. And the simple fact remains that people who sit and wait for someone else to make them successful will never be successful. Blaming other people for your failures is a ticket to misery.
Not to take anything away from Herman Cain, who worked very hard to earn his fortune and deserves praise for that (his misguided politics aside), but there is such a thing as being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people that can give you opportunities others don't have, so it's disingenuous to point to one example of someone who was able to escape poverty and say that everyone can have the same outcome if you only try hard enough. Sometimes it's the luck of the draw, sometimes it's hard work, and sometimes it's being the child of privilege.
One of Cain's father Luther's many odd jobs when their family was poor and struggling in Atlanta was to be the personal chauffeur for Coca-Cola CEO Robert Woodruff. Woodruff was fond of Cain's father and a generous man to his personal staff, so when Luther asked for Coca-Cola stock as a bonus over and above his standard paycheck, Woodruff obliged, as he liked to give his employees valuable gifts. With the stock dividends increasing in value along with the rapidly growing company, Cain's father was able to lift his family out of poverty into a stable middle class lifestyle that allowed him to help pay (along with scholarships and a part time job at Coca-Cola's research and development lab, which Woodruff helped with) for his son's education at Morehouse College. After a stint in the Navy Cain returned to Coca-Cola and was made an executive based on a combination of his skills and his connections within the company. And from then on with some occasional downs he was generally on an upwardly mobile track through several other corporations.
So it's all well and good and certainly true to say he worked very hard to get where he was, but there was also a HUGE amount of luck involved in his father getting a job as a chauffeur for a benevolent CEO who was willing to give a black man and his son in Jim Crow-era Georgia a better lifestyle and a foot in the door at a major corporation. Were all the other impovershed people in Georgia who weren't lucky enough to make that kind of personal connection when they needed it most lazy? We're talking families where both parents are working multiple shifts in a day to make ends meet for their kids, not people who weren't making an effort.
So, while I believe in capitalism in principle, I don't believe in unfettered capitalism without strict regulation and generous social safety nets to provide for those people who weren't lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, to know the right people, to inherit wealth and powerful connections from their parents, or to be born to privilege in a society that still discriminates —maliciously or structurally— against certain groups. A hybrid of capitalism and socialism that draws from the best traits of both philosophies is the way to go, and despite efforts to strip that away, has been how our country has operated in varying stages over the past 80 years, though obviously less so than the European model.
