De facto socialism.

You have to hand it to the left and their coterie of media boot lickers. Every thing the left has done for the last 100 years has been to subvert and distort free markets in favor of interventionism and redistribution. This painted whore of a simulacrum of a pale shadow of capitalism is thus known in our national discourse as "capitalism" for which "socialism" is the answer. Confucius call your office.

Ron Paul makes essentially the same point in his RT interview yesterday that Charles Hugh Smith made about ours being a predatory system of economic exploitation (i.e., socialism):

Ron Paul: I think the problem is all in semantics. When they [young adults] say they oppose today’s capitalism, I oppose today’s so-called capitalism. I don’t even like the world “capitalism,” I like “free markets.” But if you say “free markets” and “capitalism” together, we don’t have that. We have interventionism. We have a planned economy, we have a welfare state, we have inflationism, we have central economic planning by a central bank, we have a belief in deficit financing. It is so far removed from free-market capitalism that it’s foolish for people to label it free market and capitalize on this and say: “We know it’s so bad. What we need is socialism.” That is a problem.

That is a problem in definitions and understanding of what kind of policies we have. I am a champion of free markets, but not of the current system that we have today. I am highly critical of it, because it is designed to fail. It is designed to reward the rich; it is designed inevitably to destroy the middle class, and also to finance some of the worst things in government: all the deficits with the welfare state and for the warfare state. So yes, it’s failing. People should reject what we have, but they shouldn’t reject liberty and freedom and sound economic policies, because that is not the problem. The problem is we don’t have enough free markets.^[1]

I don't see that our economic system is designed to fail. I think he means it is inherently unstable no matter the justifications, cognitive dissonance, or denial of the elite. What matters to them is "I've got mine" and they have no sense of urgency about examining structural problems and backing out of the mad hole we're in. Paul notes the unhappiness of the young and sympathizes. Their take, however, fails to see the danger to political liberty from an ever-strengthening, increasingly-unchallengeable central government that has loosed all constitutional bonds.

So elites were quite happy to diminish liberty and prosperity for all by ignoring basic principles of political economy, embracing economic interventionism, and indulging in lunatic political, social, and cultural engineering (not without active malevolence) and the next generation want wealth distribution but are horribly indifferent to or unaware of the totalitarian horrors of the last century.

This election we'll see how this plays out with the elites and the young wondering as we speak about whether to support one or the other of the twin horrors of leftism. Ever hear them say boo about the stuff in this chart?

Note Obama contribution. That's what Hillary wants to "build on."

Notes
^[1] "‘Our economic system is designed to fail’ – Ron Paul." Russia Today, 5/3/16.

H/t: Zero Hedge and Of Two Minds (chart).