Capitalism, Socialism, Communism

In class the other day we played a game where the teacher distributed 3 pieces of candy to most students but to a couple she gave 10 pieces to.  This represented the majority of the people living in poverty and the small percentage of the wealthy.  Then we had to play rock, paper, scissors with people in the class, and if you won, you got to take a piece of their candy.  We did this for a while and a lot of people complained about always losing but a couple people got a lot more candy than when they started off with.  Next, the teacher collected all of the candy and redistributed it all equally.  This was unfair to the people who had a lot of candy, but the people who had little or none at all were happy about this.  This represented socialism and how the government, the teacher, controlled the economy and brought economic equality to everyone.  Then we had a choice to play rock, paper, scissors again and this represented communism because people agreed to have an equal amount of candy.  I thought that this activity was really fun, especially because we got to eat the candy afterwards.

Marx's theory of Capitalism, Socialism and Communism was meant to help the poor because if everyone agreed to have the same amount of money and not stand for people having a lot more, communism, then everyone would have the same amount of money and hopefully not be in poverty.  Also with his idea of Socialism, the government would control the economy and try to make it so that everyone had the same amount of money.  Smith's theory of the "invisible hand" states that the government would allow people to buy and sell goods as they please and then the consumers would look for the highest quality and lowest priced thing and buy that.  This way the economy would eventually equal itself out because people would increase the quality of their goods but lower the price, further helping the poor who could now afford to buy the goods.

I think the Smith's theory of the "invisible hand" is the best idea because that way, the market prices would go down because the manufacturers would have to compete with the lowest prices.  This way more people could afford the goods and this would help out the economy with more cash flow going around.  More money in peoples hands due to the drop in prices would then allow for people to buy more items and then the economy would eventually stabilize itself.  True, it might take a while, but this could be fixed with the government helping it along a little.

The Invisible Hand