It is not hyperbole to say America is a great country. We are the best country in the world. Immigration issues prove it: everyone wants to come here.

But it is also fair to say even GREAT things have problems, and are not without flaws.

Ironically, one of America’s greatest attributes is also one of its great flaws: Capitalism.

In America, people with great ideas or skills can make themselves unique, make themselves rich, make themselves special. Only in America can this happen to anyone, from any walk of life, from any race, from any gender, from any financial strata. It’s an unique opportunity existing for everyone in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

We won’t get into why America possesses this opportunity, that’s a long story. But we do need to understand what being a successful Capitalist society means to those who are not special, enough, to take advantage of the opportunity.

As noted before, our Capitalist system is fertile ground for special people with great ideas or great skill and the nerves to profit from them. American baseball players, for example, make millions of dollars per year playing baseball.

But there are 300 million Americans and approximately 1,500 professional baseball players.This means, in our Capitalist system, the remaining 299,998,500 American citizens pay money to support the baseball players. Even simpler, the CEO of Walmart needs 300,000,000 million Americans to buy Walmart’s products so he can pay himself $10 million dollars a year in salary.

As simple as it sounds, there doesn’t appear to be anything sinister, so far: special people get rich in America by convincing un-special Americans to fork over their money. It may hurt the “unspecial” to be called “unspecial”, but no law has been broken and the system has now worked for centuries.

But…when a small per cent of the citizens become “too” special, too rich, the system is headed for ruin. In the US now, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and all the poor can do is dream they could get rich, too. Or buy lottery tickets.

In our system, the rich getting richer does not make it easier for any special, poor person to get rich.

If you think of the US money supply as a pie, imagine the 1% of America that is really rich, taking over 90 per cent of the pie. There is not a lot of pie left for the remaining 99% of Americans.

This is a way over-simplified summary of a huge problem and it would take a book to detail it all, accurately. But it needs to be said: America will not survive another 200 years, or even 100, if the rich keep taking more and more from the poor without a process to end the homelessness, hunger, crime, drug abuse, and depression caused by being poor in an affluent society, with the resulting hopelessness. America will become a country of gated communities, each with their own security, maybe even their own economic systems. And areas of America will be economic deserts where the America’s great asset, Opportunity, will no longer exist.

And when the opportunity no longer exists for each and every citizen, how GREAT will America be?