Politics worked great for the average American after WW2, it wasn't until Buckley v. Valeo that we saw the decline of the middle class.
I believe a fiat money system is fundamentally flawed, capitalism itself is flawed, but that's not the most important issue. That can be addressed after the money in politics and corruption in government issue is sorted out. They somewhat go hand in hand
I'm afraid that is a massive distortion. America was one of the few countries left basically untouched outside of a few incidents during WW2. More over because of the nuclear bomb and the size of the American military you made your currency the world reserve, which is a very envious place to be. The world needed rebuilding and as a result we saw a lot of GDP growth.
That's only one court decision of many that led to the current situation and it's impact is really pretty debatable anyway.
You will never solve the problems if you actively ignore the major variables causing them. More over, how did these people get so god damn rich in the first place? The individuals the court ruled could use their own funds to promote themselves. In the case of powerful people, it's almost always through cronyism and sweetheart deals - often gifted by government (especially during times of war when it seems profit margins no longer are a concern and much gouging took place).
Further, the very base mechanisms of the system in place necessitate the flow of wealth to those with the best credit ratings. Receive money first, benefit most. Receive last, benefit least.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2...ars-of-income-inequality-in-america-in-graphs
You can take them further and they don't look all that different.
These graphs highlight this effect quite nicely. Although there are many which all demonstrate the same phenomenon. It would be even better if it included all income groups (the extremely wealthy would be laughing at the massive gains they've seen), but it does not.
In reality no one should ever consistently make the correct calls. In practice with the current system those who have the ear of the Reserve have a massive advantage in knowing potential rate swings in advance. Somehow, magically, the old wealth of yesteryear (Rockefeller, Rothschild, Warburg, the Aldrich's et al) who constitute modern wealth today appeared to not suffer even a bit from the first Great Depression (or any other major Recession). And there's good reason - they were out of the market before the Fed pulled the plug on the house of cards they had built. They then deliberately made it worse to further push prices down. A lot of valuable things are bought during these periods for fractions of their actual worth in the long haul.
Centralized banking is a tenant of communism, not capitalism. And considering the money supply is arguably the most important commodity in a modern economy, well, it's very hard to describe the current system as a capitalist one.