Rewind back to before Obama took the Oval Office. I know it kills many of us to do that, but try it. Ask yourself, "Is this capitalism?" Some suggest that it is, and that it has failed. Bush’s economic policies did fail: from the tax cuts not paying for themselves, all the way to the no bid contracts. Bush and many other Republicans have tried trickle-down and equated it with capitalism. In response, people have suggested that capitalism has failed. I, on the other hand, believe that plays right into the Republicans’ language, and I am not willing to surrender the term "capitalism" to the Republicans when they have corrupted the term, inappropriately claimed it’s theirs, and have refused to admit their policies have failed, and that they are not capitalism.
This provides a good laugh and summary of how they are hardly the party of capitalism.
Capitalism is supposed to be about entrepreneurship and self-interest. People who are profit-seeking find an unfulfilled need or desire, fulfill it, and make money doing so. They have every incentive to do so. Capitalism is the one system that has allowed people to profit by serving their fellow citizen. The extent they are able to profit is supposed to determine how well they are filling an unfulfilled need or desire. Then, if they are making high profits, that is a sign the need or desire has been greatly unfulfilled, and attracts other people to enter the industry to fill that need or desire, and the competition brings the price down. This also signals that the need or desire is now being better fulfilled. The same is true with profits going down but no new entries into the industry: it demonstrates that people have begun to value it less, so the need or desire is less unfulfilled. People will do something for one of two reasons: self-interest, and brute force. Capitalism is about people pursing their own self-interest, and self-interest is aligned with providing for others in such a system. A weird paradox: capitalism provides much but guarantees little.
Capitalism has many underpinnings and defining characteristics: incentives (prices, property, profit and loss), symmetrical information, rule of law, entrepreneurship, internalized costs, self-interest, and the big one known as competition. We have never had pure capitalism anywhere, and we’ve also never had pure monopoly anywhere. Capitalism is certainly not about giving some people artificial advantages over others. Republicans argue that social programs for the least affluent, the graduated income tax, consumer, worker and environmental protections are all an affront to capitalism. They haven’t stopped to look in the mirror and realize they are not ones to be calling others anti-capitalist. "Welfare" for the rich is good to them. I don't primarily mean the tax cuts, not taking someone's money isn't the same as welfare. Rather, their idea of trickle down is that if you give corporations and the wealthy all they want, all will be well for everyone, and they say that is capitalism. They say they don’t trust government meddling in the economy, then get elected and demonstrate why they can’t be trusted with the economy. They have done a good job messing capitalism up themselves, especially the big one, competition.
EDIT: A little bit about insurance companies. Insurance companies, in their current state, are an abuse of capitalism, mostly by taking advantage of asymmetrical information. Health insurance companies are supposed to make a profit by providing people health insurance they otherwise cannot afford. As we all know, it’s supposed to be financed by premiums paid over time, and more money is paid in through premiums over time (from everyone insured, collectively) than has to eventually be paid out in medical expenses (to everyone insured, collectively), and insurance companies profit while providing people insurance. Insurance companies, however, are making profits by signing people up to deals that contain many complexities they know the average Joe doesn’t understand, collecting their premiums, then dumping people when they are asking for what they’ve paid for. Fraud is defined as "a deception deliberately practiced to secure unfair or unlawful gain." Would intentionally providing contracts the signatory will not understand, and asking questions that are easy to make an error on (and having such errors to be grounds for dropping), constitute as deception? I think so. To DEPEND on the other party not understanding the terms of the deal, that is deception. In other words, fraud, not capitalism. Their actions might not be technically illegal, doesn’t change that it meets the definition of fraud and should be illegal.
What does competition imply? Competition implies the race being fair (including internalized costs and benefits, many appropriate ways to internalize such things. Also symmetrical information), equal opportunity, and perhaps most importantly: proper enforcement. Inequality of outcome is acceptable in capitalism, as it should be. However, inequality of opportunity is not capitalism, that’s feudalism, at best. Republicans endorse what is currently feudal, and call it capitalism.
"Ok already, get to the point...how are they anti-capitalist?" Wait no longer. The Republicans have been instrumental when it comes to destroying capitalism: natural resource ownership, no-bid contracts, narrow-based tax loopholes and subsidies, and corporations. I will be clear, some Democrats are just as guilty, and some Republicans are not guilty when it comes to these. I will address each one of them individually:
Natural resource ownership: Capitalism operates under the premise that you own what you earn, or produce. Not a guarantee that you will earn, but that you will own if you earn. Natural resources existed far before people, let alone any of us right now. Nobody created them, no one can earn them, but somehow people are allowed to own them. I’m not against people owning natural resources; natural resources, especially land, are needed to produce wealth. We have a graduated income tax now, but government investments give that money back to those who pay the most, leaving the poor and middle class out in the cold. For example, taxes pay for schools, roads, police, etc...and that increases land value, without the owner doing a thing. Given that land owners tend to be upper-middle to upper class, they get the money they paid back in land value. This allows people to accrue wealth without action, pass it on to their next family generation, without compensating the community for increasing their wealth. Is this an affront to capitalism? You bet. Fred Harrison has a great video about it here.
We need a system to distinguish wealth earned from the sweat of your brow (both from working and from risking your money in investments), and wealth that was unearned. What you earn is yours and no one else has a claim to it, but what you did not earn cannot be considered yours without governmental sanction. We need what’s known as a land value tax, a tax on the land as if no improvements were made on it. In other words, land owners paying economic rent for the land they own. Among it being consistent with capitalism, a tax on land encourages building up instead of out, efficient use of land, individuals selling surplus land (making it easier to afford), and reduces the need for superficial command and control measures. The same is true with all other natural resources, such as oil.
No-bid contracts: Halliburton. Need I say more? When private companies provide services to the government (and therefore the people), and get our money, government has an obligation to see that money is spent efficiently. Republicans campaign on that, but when elected, they’ve resorted to no-bid contracts that didn’t need to be no-bid. When government does not obtain bidding, they are forcing winners and helping give companies more of a share, making them closer to a monopoly. No-bid contracts are the prime example of artificial advantages over others, and they are at the expense of our money and economy as a whole.
Narrow-based tax loopholes and subsidies: Usually known under the narrow definition of corporate welfare. The words "corporate welfare" don’t tend to resonate with Republicans, as they don’t view it as "welfare." They would argue that unlike the least affluent, these are successful and disciplined people that deserve to be rewarded. Corporate welfare, the narrow meaning, is an artificial advantage given to some over others. For every dollar not taxed, we need to raise taxes on dollars we do tax. For all the loopholes we give, that’s offset either by raising tax rates for everyone else, or raising the "baby tax" (debt). Both cases provide an artificial advantage to the recipients and disadvantage to everyone else. Subsidies are not too different. Subsidies are like steroids that are paid for by extorting money from everyone else. Give steroids to certain teams, they will outperform the others when they otherwise would not have. If they would have otherwise, they wouldn’t need steroids. Then it gets worse; once steroids are being used by one team, it becomes in the interests of the other teams to participate, and they are at a disadvantage if they don’t. Then it gets even worse; steroids take their toll on the players, money was invested in them that would have been better invested on other players, the team is a mess, investments that would have been worthy have gone by the wayside, and money went down the drain. Just like the economy, give subsidies to a business, they invest more in labor and capital than they otherwise would have, preventing labor and capital from going to more economical uses, they end up in a worse situation once reality sets in. At the expense of capitalism and the economy, the Republicans get behind corporate welfare.
Finally everyone’s favorite, corporations: Particularly limited liability. First, corporations are obviously not people. They are not living, breathing, thinking entities. Even if they were people, the privileges granted to corporations would be unjustified. Imagine suing someone, collecting fair damages, then the government redistributing part of it back to the defendant. I am sure you would cry foul, and that’s what limited liability is. Such is inappropriate to give to a person, let alone a corporation. Medical malpractice caps would also apply here, and anything that allows anyone to get away with paying less than proper damages. If they want to call corporations "people," they should start by ending privileges unique to corporations.
The Republicans complain about Democrats and "their social programs, the graduated income tax, consumer, worker, and environmental protections," and say they are an affront to capitalism and the free market. The pot makes a pathetic attempt to call the kettle black. As much or as little as these things are an affront to capitalism, they are nothing compared to what the Republicans have done. To use an analogy, the Republicans take the meat, put chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones in it, throw it at the Democrats, the Democrats try mitigating the effects of those substances, and the Republicans say the Democrats attacked the meat. An example from way back is the legal sanctioning of unions to counter the effects of regulatory capture by big business. To be fair, the Democrats don’t always properly reverse or mitigate the Republican effects, but it is the Republicans who have put the Democrats in that position and called them out for trying to fix it, all the while the meat was "poisoned" by the Republicans. I am not willing to surrender the term "capitalism" to a party that has poisoned everything about it, and I hope you won’t either.