Unclear and convoluted. The phrase he should be using is capitalist class, but that scares liberals, and thus he's going to try and make a distinction between "good capitalists" and "bad capitalists," as he's doing here.
Are you putting small business owners (I'm talking about real small business here, not what the Republicans call "small business") in the same category as Bill Gates, then?
Do small businesses not make a profit from the exploitation of the labor of their employees? If the answer is yes, small business owners are still capitalists. Sure, they're not big time capitalists, and I wouldn't necessarily put them in the same class category as capitalists (I'd make a distinction that they're members of the petty bourgeoisie, rather than the big bourgeoisie, of course), but that doesn't negate the fact that the actual problem at hand is not billionaires or millionaires, but capitalism itself. You can go on and on about how terrible the Koch Brothers are or how monopolies should be held to account, but if you take on the Kochs or bust up AT&T without busting up capitalism, there will be another Koch Brothers and another AT&T because that's how capitalism works.
My issue here is with confusing who the actual enemy is. Sanders is doing the public a disservice when he, as a self-proclaimed socialist, does not indict capitalism as the problem. He's essentially reinforcing liberal ideas about how we can continue going about our business once the 'bad apples' have been removed and certain policies reformed, which contradicts the entire history of the 20th Century. We tried busting trusts, regulating the economy, and setting up a welfare state to reform the excesses of capitalism. Trusts reformed, regulations were either tailor-fit to help business or agencies were captured by businesses and then undermined, and the welfare state has been gutted. Don't you think that the failure of those policies warrants something else being tried in the 21st Century? Something that makes it impossible for regulations to be undermined, trusts to be formed in the first place, and the welfare state to be undone?
You know, the system of yours in which you prefer everything to be run by the government in order to take care of its citizens is a good idea, where everyone is equal, no one has more power over another person, etc.
But that's really where it stops.
We've seen in places like the Soviet Union where that system leads to a lot of corruption (and I'm not pretending that there's no corruption with business, because there's obviously a lot), and we're seeing countries like China and Cuba beginning to move to capitalist systems again because it works in a world that is mostly capitalist. Even when a society is completely anti-business (ugh I never thought I would use that phrase), it just doesn't work, and its because the leaders of the government tend to be so corrupt that the people do not thrive, we saw that in the USSR and we see that in North Korea, and the government can't really be trusted when it has full control over every aspect of people's lives, from the things they buy to the homes they live in.
Of course an argument you could use is the "co-op business" or "armed left" theories, but a business where all of the employees hold a share of it (which is a really great idea in practice) can only work in smaller cases, maybe a few thousand employees at most, but it wouldn't work in a country of 315 million people, or a world of 7.2 billion. The armed left argument doesn't make too much sense to me either, since there's the whole problem with the insurgents fighting the nation's military (if it was necessary) and if they were to be successful, then what would happen? They continue along with another government that is bound to be corrupt after a victorious, people-led beginning? As I've said before, there's obviously corruption in business, but with checks and balances, it isn't nearly as severe as the corruption that would occur if a country had a government with no checks and balances. A completely laissez-faire government or a completely socialist/marxist government cannot work.
I agree that today's businesses need more regulation. They need to treat their employees with more respect, pay them higher wages, receive harsher penalties for disregarding workers rights, and the people at the top should never have as much power over the government as they do today. I believe that if a company is too big to fail, it should be broken up so it doesn't have an incredibly disastrous effect on our economy, that we should have a government more invested in people rather than a corporation.
But we've seen that a completely socialist/marxist/whatever government cannot work, and you might be thinking "what an awful liberal", but history has given us many examples to show that that kind of government cannot work and will not work.
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