Progressive-socialism v Freemarket Capitalism

“The United States and other industrialized nations have experienced an employment shift away from the goods-producing sector and toward the service-providing sector in recent decades.” This is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics within the Department of Commerce. I wonder how much money it cost us for them to gather this data. I ask because I read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler in the early 1970s. He stated 42 years ago that the industrial age was waning just as the agricultural age had over a century before. It is a fact that as efforts mature, advances are implemented which increase productivity but decrease the need for manual labor. For agriculture it was the tractor replacing the team-driven plow. For industries it was first steam and then electrical or diesel engines. Now it is computers, robotics and the global economy. Productivity is higher; quality is better; workers are safer.

Ignorant people – who don't read folks like Toffler – claim that they are being forced out of business by “un-fair” competition. Freemarketers claim that competition makes the market more efficient. Progressive-socialists claim it is a wrong to be righted by total government control. They want to make everyone equally inefficient. Rather than equality of opportunity, they want equality of results.