Businesses have at least five stakeholders: shareholders or owners; employees; suppliers; customers; and the community at large that supplies infrastructure necessary for business. The problem with capitalism as it’s practised in English-speaking countries is that profits are not shared by all stakeholders; only shareholders benefit. The result is the increasing wealth of the one per cent while wages stagnate, the middle class shrinks and poverty increases.
The cause of this is free-market capitalism which amounts only to the freedom to exploit. But you don’t have to adopt communism or socialism to make the system fairer. What’s needed is better-regulated capitalism.
‘Regulation’ is a dirty word to the corporate capitalists because it means they have to share their profits more widely and there are limits to their ability to exploit. But it can be done. In Scandinavia and Germany, for example, it’s expected that employees who participate in the production of profits should share in their benefits.
We need better regulation of business so corporations actually pay some tax and profits are more equitably shared. So if, say, a supermarket chain makes a big profit, customers could benefit by frozen or reduced prices, farmers could get a bit more for their produce, employees could get a pay rise or other benefits as well as the shareholders receiving dividends.
For capitalism to be fair all stakeholders should benefit from profits and corporations should pay their share of taxes.
The truth is that capitalism structured the way it is here is inherently unfair. But changing that will be almost impossible because, in Australia, as in the rest of the West, capital controls politicians and politics.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
