"Still, eBay's user base has grown by only 1 percent..."

So? If they're making oodles of money, who gives a rat's ass if they grow or not? Why can't they stay right where they are, but still be making tons of money?

I read a long time ago that HP had decided to drop one part of its line because it was only rated at #2 in the world, and they realized they could NEVER get to #1. Again, SO??? Being #2 doesn't mean they were losing money, in fact, they were making a huge profit.

Our economy doesn't just create monsters of greed and avarice - it also creates losers. For every winner there's at least one failure, and those losers and failures are drains on society. We see the rich getting mega-rich, we see the middle class shrinking, and the tides of the poor becoming astronomical - where does this all lead???

I'm not a communist, nor a socialist, but I think that MODERATION in everything needs to be brought back into our way of doing things.

Dingle_Derry_Doo wonders: Our economy doesn't just create monsters of greed and avarice - it also creates losers. For every winner there's at least one failure, and those losers and failures are drains on society. We see the rich getting mega-rich, we see the middle class shrinking, and the tides of the poor becoming astronomical - where does this all lead???

LeRoy: If there are 300 million people in a race, for every winner, there's at least 299,999,999 losers or failures. The real problem is that we have developed a 'winner-take-all' economy, which is why the gulf between the ultra-rich and everyone else is widening so dramatically, as the statistics clearly show. Where does it all lead? In the long run, which is not very long from now, to a Marie Antoinette 'let them eat cake' kind of capitalism.

And you can study your history to find out where that led to...

you don't get American capitalism (and unfortunately, this sickness is spreading).

It is completely predicated on growth. Even beyond profitability. As long as you are growing. Under this paradigm, to not be growing at double-digit percentages anually is to be "moving backward" or "shrinking" or "losing".

American capitalism has no concept of steady state. This was fine when we were a frontier country. Growth is great in that sense as it can mask all sorts of mistakes, mismanagement and outright theft (think Enron). Managing a steady-state economy is actually much more difficult. But this is largely what Europe has been doing for decades. They are not a frontier, and haven't been for about a thousand years. There are companies there that have been in business for decades, even centuries, at more or less the same size, same profitability and same income, supporting the same number of employees with vacations and benefits and so on. In the US, these companies would have been scrapped long ago as underperformers, along with the employees (but only after first raiding their pension funds which has been legal here since Reagan).

This model is, of course, not sustainable. And just look at the things corporations have been doing to try to sustain double-digit growth in a near-stead-state country (and without immigration, we would be steady-state or even negative-growth): outsourcing to China, Mexico and India, lower wages for produciton workers here, fewer benefits, less vacation, no pensions (and raiding what was there), lower quality and so on. And, of course, throughout it all senior-management earnings have been going through the roof (even up to 1Billion dollars for life...) even as everyone else is being cut, reduced, moved to part-time and so on. (yeah - what ever happened to trickle-down?).

Thank you for the input regarding Europe. I might have known. They have been continuing to be rational and humane there for the last 30 years, while American capitalism has fallen prey to all the ills that you and others have mentioned.

I believe I know ONE reason for this. The rest is beyond me. That reason is, of all things, the defeat of the Soviet Union and communism as world forces. Obviously that system made its people miserable and had to go. But for several decades, from the 1920s through the 1980s, Soviet communism was viewed as a viable alternative to capitalism throughout much of the developing world. Believe me, I was there (since I am now one of The Old), and I know.

So our capitalists knew they were in a competition for nothing less than access to the rest of the world. And they saw that to keep that access they had to show the developing world that they could create a humane society that could benefit the broad mass of people in the US, since the ability to do that was the chief claim of communism. So they were restrained in their treatment of workers, and in their demands for profit. Hence the large, prosperous middle class and less extreme income differential we had in the 1950s through the early 1980s.

But now, boy the gloves are off! They won. The whole world is open to investment. There is no ideaology that builds resistance to it anywhere. Therefore our investor class, being good "economic men", put pressure on everyone everywhere to give them the maximum possible return on every dollar they invest.

An the devil take the hindmost.