Capitalismo

Bob Rice, no HuffPo: "The indignant screams still echo on Wall Street: Obama's a Socialist! As its own hometown paper puts it, the President's pronouncement that its collective $18 billion year-end tip was "outrageous" amounted to "targeting what capitalists we have left for abuse" (WSJ, Feb 2).

This is all helpful clarification, because I was getting confused. I had this fuzzy, but obviously incorrect, recollection from college that in a capitalist society it was the owners of the "means of production" who got the value created by their use.

But now I've got it: at least on Wall Street, it's the workers using those means of production (their firms' money) who are entitled to any profits they make. And, apparently, small groups of those workers are entitled to their profits even if other parts of their firms have catastrophic losses that require the owners of the enterprise to put in more money (or new owners, like taxpayers, have to be brought in) to keep the cooperative afloat. So that's capitalism. Wow, did I have it backwards!"