Climbing up the Chocolate Ladder

          In class we have been learning about Karl Marx's theory of capitalism, socialism, and communism. As an introduction to these different systems, we had an interactive experiment during class in which we used Hershey kisses as money. Everybody started out with 2 except for two people who each had a big handful. To simulate competition within the economy and trying to become wealthier we started playing rock, paper, scissors against each other. If you lost, you would have to give a chocolate to the winner and if you lost all of you chocolate you had to sit down. In the end, most people lost all their chocolate and there were a couple people with a pile of them. This represented Marx's idea of capitalism. It is when there is freedom of competition among different social classes and it resulted in very unequal social classes. Then, the teacher collected all the chocolates and redistributed them evenly. This was to show socialism with the teacher as the government controlling industry and distribution and making sure everyone was equal. Communism had a similar goal to this, which is to have no classes within the people and give everyone an equal pay, however a big difference was that communism would have no government involved. I thought this activity was a fun way to help us understand Marx's theory but it was frustrating at times like when I lost all my chocolate but in the end I got them back. 
          Karl Marx believed he could help the poor with his theories of government systems. He thought that it would start out with capitalism. To have more equality and fairness, the people would eventually move to socialism with no social classes but still a government controlling industry. In order to completely rid society of social classes and bring total economic equality, the majority of people would move to a system where there are still no social classes but also no government. Marx thought this would help the poor gain money without having to work hard and no poor class would exist anymore. Industrial England had very extreme levels of richness and poorness and it was almost impossible to increase your social status if you were poor. Marx's theory would get rid of that problem and there would be no need for competition. A man named Adam Smith later created an alternative system often called the "invisible hand". It is essentially capitalism but this is a different idea of how a country would reach it. The government would basically hand over the economy and freedom to buy and sell to the people and let them control it themselves, getting rid of the government's helping hand. Smith believed that eventually the economy would work itself out since people would want high quality goods for low prices and businesses with them would succeed and others would lower prices to meet the competition. Adam Smith was deeply concerned with how to help the poor class and he thought that with this system, they would eventually be able to afford the high quality products and get back into the market and out of poverty.

          Both of these theories have their flaws. With Marx's system, it eventually forces everybody to be equal to each other and even though this could benefit the poor, this would hurt the more wealthy people that worked hard to earn their money and have to give a lot of it up. Also, this might make people want to work the easiest job possible because they know they'll still be getting the same amount of money and there will be nobody for the important and difficult jobs. While there are countries that have adopted this system like North Korea and Russia, they still have government power and don't totally follow after the ideas of communism. The government controls their rights and interferes apt. With Smith's system, the economy would most likely take a really long time to work out and during that time a lot of people would suffer from the bad state of the economy. I don't think either of these systems would be the best option for a country's government but the invisible hand is definitely better. 

A video explaining Smith's "invisible hand" theory:
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulyVXa-u4wE&feature=youtu.be