Your ideal capitalism would also imply that labor gets rapidly rewarded for increases in productivity, efficiency, output, and restricted supply/excess demand f

Your ideal capitalism would also imply that labor gets rapidly rewarded for increases in productivity, efficiency, output, and restricted supply/excess demand for their skills. Everything about America is quite the opposite. It is cartel suppression of rewarding labor, and has been for centuries now. Control of labor "costs" and hostile labor relations is openly discussed in business schools and the management community for just as long. All you have to do is watch a CEO immediately demand increased compensation for some arbitrary increase in the stock price, perhaps due to overall all boats rising, fortuitous market conditions, etc. But if you're a worker bee that saves the company a million dollars a year, or bring in 10 million dollars of sales by improving the product, what do you get? A plaque. You can also tell with the classic news story: "there's not enough available people for X job". This is literally first day of microeconomics: well, increase wages (prices) in order to spur supply increase to meet demand. Which is heresy in oligarchical and management circles, the same "laissez faire" "economics is god-science" cult. The theory and academics of economics have truths and pursue the same goals of any field of study. But the sad fact is that economics as an institution of civilization is not, it exists to server the oligarch/management class, provide the tools of their continued and expanded influence, and suppress the people. It professorships are funded and sponsored by the rich and powerful. Think tanks, elite positions in central banks and regulatory agencies, and the like implicitly and explicitly reward those "thought leaders" that serve the rich and powerful, and exert a negative career influence on economists that do not. This is not just squabbling over the share of the pie. The institution of economics is complicit in the decades-long denialism of impending environmental dangers that will threaten us collectively in the coming decades.