How to explain our current economic system in a single paragraph

[ck4829]

On a street, there are three men. The first man is a disheveled and exhausted from years of homelessness. There's a small tin can with him with the word "change" written on it. The second man looks very stressed out, he doesn't know what to do. He carries a sign that has "Unemployed. Looking for anything" written on it. The third man wears a business suit and looks quite content. There is a 55 gallon drum by him, "Just lost CEO position, only got 100 million dollars." Suddenly the media and the government drive by. The media looks at the three men, and says to the government, "We need to do something about this." The government says "By golly, you are right!" and then they pick up the third man, take him into their limo, and all three of them live happily ever after.

[IndianaGreen]

1. Our current economic system in a single word: serfdom!

The 21st century version of serfdom, a system in which the people have no say so in the government, and the government is run on behalf of the modern day feudal lords that exploit the people and the planet.

[blindpig]

2. another

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

That's from the Communist Manifesto, one hundred sixty years ago the old man saw it, it has occurred again and again, it's time to take a hint.