The Responsible Free Market Economy -- The Leader's Way, Chapter 9

Socialism and Capitalism

Socialism is a great concept. Conceptual, it should bring benefits to all and eliminate poverty. But in practice, power in socialistic society tends to be in the hand of a group of few people. Most people work very hard, but gain very little. Lacking motivation, socialistic economy tends to be stagnant. Although socialism focuses on the distribution of wealth, there is no wealth to distribute.

Capitalism, on the other hand, promotes competition in a free market. Freedom breeds competition. Free and fair competition leads to creation and wealth. Capitalism focuses on creation of wealth, not the distribution of wealth. Therefore, rich people become richer, while the poor remains poor.


Responsible Free Market Economy

In a free market, the roles of government are to

• Establish infrastructure necessary for fair competition.
• Development of property rights
• Bring in justice

From time to time, companies tend to form a group to collude in fixing product price, removing supply from the market, pressuring the government create regulation which prevents fair competition. The government should try to resist the pressure and set things right.

Although the government play a major role in distributing well being to its citizen, we cannot entirely rely on the government.

"It is impossible for the government to make people behave decently by law. The system will only work well when the leader in business and government have right motivation and act accordingly."

Given more freedom, the companies just have to act more responsibly.

Source: THE Leader's Way: Business, Buddhism and happiness in an interconnected world by His Holyiness The Dalai Lama and Laurens Van Den Muyzenberg, Chapter 9 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Next Part].
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.