[Antoninus]

You can describe people and their conduct as ethical or unethical, but I don't know how you describe an economic system that way.

Seriously?

If the participants in an economic system were robots, you might have a case. Last time I checked, they were always humans operating under a moral code.

Capitalism tends not to work in the third world because nobody gives a fig about outright theft. No one honors contracts. No one cares about doing an honest job for a fair price. It worked here because people did care about those things and the government, more often than not, enforced the rules and punished those who broke them.

How is this difficult?

[kabar]

You are describing the behavior of individuals or corporations, not the capitalist economic system. Can you have ethical and unethical socialism? Ethical or unethical driving? The point is that capitalism is not per se or inherently ethical or unethical.

Capitalism tends not to work in the third world because nobody gives a fig about outright theft. No one honors contracts. No one cares about doing an honest job for a fair price. It worked here because people did care about those things and the government, more often than not, enforced the rules and punished those who broke them.

Socialism and communism don't work in the developing world either. I think our government has overregulated the practice of capitalism hobbling it out of some sort of sense of "fairness" that is really the influence of interest groups and the political elites. The minimum wage is a good example.