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Limits of Capitalism
This entry was posted on 4/8/2009 10:26 AM and is filed under Added Articles.
Prologue
Imagine a large family with twelve kids which the parents determine is to be raised according to strict free-market capitalistic principles. This would involve taking fairly well worn methods – to the victor goes the spoils, may the best boy or girl win, the devil take the hindmost – and turning them into a general childrearing philosophy.
Before long in such a household all the large portions at meals, the greater opportunities at educational training, the nicest clothes, the greatest opportunities for social advancement and the most basic and overt parental affection would begin to be apportioned not according to need but to efficiency and best use. Therefore these benefits would begin to gravitate into the possession of only a few of the most promising, aggressive and favored children with the greatest perceived future earning potential.
The older children would have the first obvious advantage. Their clothes and toys would be new to begin with while the younger ones would be lucky to get hand-me-downs and retreads. And because they were bigger they could simply wrest the most prized dessert portions and desirable possessions away from the weaker, younger children. But in some instances a younger child too, giving the lie to generalizations about the biggest always being best, might prove agile and quick witted, charmed or even cute enough to succeed at a level nearly equivalent to the older, more favored ones in the competition for their parents’ love and benediction.
On the other hand, some older kids might not be as intelligent or as good looking or as competitive as some of the others and squander their natural advantage of age and slowly fall back in the pack of also rans.
Naturally, on the down side of this familial structure, because free market forces absolutely dictate the necessity of their being both winners and losers at the competitive game of life, would dwell all the kids too weak or even just average, not pushy enough, the ones with the buck teeth and bad eyes and big ears. In addition the ones with a natural tendency to be fat or bad at sports or too philosophical to see things as quickly, or as simplistically, as the ones deemed better than them in the family, would soon be left behind in the lottery of life as well. And god help the child with an actual ailment, say asthma, or a lisp, or the one too tall or too thin, or too ungainly or too shy, etc., for they will become natural victims of the others and bullied mercilessly. For them acquiring even a crust bread and such for a meal or even a snack between meals will become an ordeal.
Sure there would also be some middle level youngsters who might occasionally be afforded prominence in certain areas and deprived in others. They too, catching up to the general trend, might sometimes resort to bullying the weakest kids and rob the one with the stuttering speech and dreamy manner of one of his few remaining toys. After all, in this house the parents, unwilling to intervene in the marketplace, wouldn’t step in to stop them.
In this house where success was judged solely on the basis of material goods and possessions, in general boys might have an early natural edge over girls do to their strength and aggression. But as girls mature faster, their intelligence and intuition might soon be used to mitigate some of these advantages. And in some instances, as with a previously alluded to “cute” one, an attractive girl would always have a place near the apex of the family food chain.
Another facet of this structure that would quickly begin to emerge would be psychological in nature. The weaker and homelier kids would soon get so accustomed to being picked on and taken from and abused, with never a real chance to win at anything in this capitalist household, that they would soon come to resemble the roles to which they had been consigned. They wouldn’t smile as often; their voices, when allowed or forced to speak would be more halting, giving them an appearance of being slow witted; they would look over their shoulders frequently to see who was coming to take something from them; they would lack a straightforward manner and stick-to-it-iveness necessary to succeed at their chores; until they would slowly lose the will to try and become increasingly sullen and isolated, bitter and demoralized as they came to realize that they would never be rewarded for their efforts or respected just for who they were in this household of broken dreams.
Why bother when bigger, better looking, more expensively educated and more popular kids would always outsmart them or cheat them of their winnings or beat them up later for the few things they had managed to pull aside for themselves? And the free market system would ensure that they would never receive redress from their parents for even the worst wrongs done to them. Their parents might sympathize to be sure but the rules of the free market which governed all their affairs could not be breached. So, they’d cry, what could they do? The plight of the parents was persuasive and heart rending as long as you chose to overlook the fact that they themselves were the ones who had arbitrarily chosen these rules to begin with.
Finally, gloom would settle in and the poorer weaker kids would begin to despair and become beset with a fatalistic sense of hopelessness. They would then tend to compensate by developing bad habits. When they were young they would be bed wetters and cry a lot. Later they would sleep more than was necessary and eat much more than they should (when and if they ever got a chance), and escape increasingly into dreamworlds and fantasies and later petty thievery, alcohol or drugs, (offered to them by an upward striving lower level kid sold to him by one of the upper level kids for a nice profit).
But as for the blest of the family all would be sweet dreams and sunshine. They received not only their own portions of the best foods and preferred places at table, and watched their preferred shows on television, but received expensive gifts on their birthdays and everything else they wanted, including, if necessary by force, the best of everything the weaker kids had. They would become hoarders of unnecessary items they didn’t even want just for the pure visceral satisfaction of keeping it away from everyone else.
Because not surprisingly, in inverse proportion, as the weak kids felt ever more morose the stronger kids would gradually come to feel ever more entitled and privileged and arrogant and selfish.
To enforce their unjust elitist advantages they would eventually consciously deign not to help out the poorer and more deprived kids because of their fear that it would provide encouragement and comfort to them which might instill “bad” habits, even hope. The weak kids had to be taught that they would get nothing in life unless they could win it from the stronger kids “legitimately” in the game that was so securely rigged against them by the preferred kids.
So they would take all the best food but, so as not to gain weight, as looks matter to them, they would waste it if they had to just to keep the other less favored kids from getting any of it. They always only left only scraps and old, unhealthy, unfulfilling and cheaply prepared fatty foods for their pasty faced, splotchy skinned siblings to fight over.
Their part of the house would have all the nicest, latest furnishings, the TV’s, new carpeting and state of the art central air conditioning and heating. The other side of the house would soon like a slum by comparison, with broken plumbing, worn carpets, lumpy beds, threadbare furniture and remain as cold in winter as it was hot in summer.
Their attitude as it evolved would become quite similar to those wealthy in capitalist societies who blame the poor for their poverty that they themselves have done so much to ensure. Thus in a capitalist system the victimizers start to blame the ones they have consistently victimized for their own victimization and manufacture charges of laziness and innate unworthiness in order to victimize them all over again.
In the end you’re left with a house divided and severely dysfunctional. It endures this way because the weaker kids really have no choice or say in the matter. There is a family council, but they are not invited to attend and if they do are not allowed to speak. If they do speak they stutter and if they speak too much or too well they will be punished for it later by the family’s upper crust kids who didn’t to hear what they had to say to begin with.
So if they want to eat at all these weaklings must continue playing the game they way it has been designed and to show respect and deference to their stronger brothers and sisters no matter how profoundly rigged against them the system is. If they rebel in any way or show any lack of respect for the process that is designed to cheat them they will be punished even more.
But why you ask, wouldn’t the majority of these who were being abused by the strong minority of kids rise against these self-entitled brats and overthrow them? Some try, there are moments of tantrums and memorable cases of individual rebellion, but being weak and disunited their efforts invariably fail. Sometimes they fail to succeed because one of their own will break the quorum and turn against his fellows – and against his own self-interest – because one, they don’t believe the high and mighty kids can be beaten or two, the superior kids have gulled them with some suggested favor which might or might not be forthcoming in payment for their betrayal. After all hunger, poverty, deprivation and even a desire to be loved will always prove a reliable compatriot of cowardice.
The middle area kids too, are in a quandary when it comes to an organized revolt. The bigger kids, enforced by the ultimate authority of their parents who back them, control too much of their future to be trusted if the revolt fails. So both sub-groups temporize and only suggest changes carefully so as not to upset the favored kids. So enterprise of great pith and moment are often turned awry and lose the name of action in fear of the terrible retribution that would follow if they should fail.
Besides and this is the most important point of all. Just as in any capitalistic society where the authorities - the politicians, courts, media, churches, bankers and money managers – are in on the scheme, these parents don’t approve of the unionization of the lower orders. Free market rules and property rights (as they’re the only ones with any real property) as they see them are used to deny the weaker kids the right to organize as being a hindrance and impediment to the free operation of markets. Of course, the stronger kids because of their much greater allowances, resources, mobility and intelligence, etc., have many, many less obvious and far more effective ways to organize against the majority in order to protect their self interest.
One could go on and on with examples but it should be clear by now that the purely capitalistic family would be riddled through with winners and losers which would very soon fall into certain highly identifiable patterns. If the sample group was large enough, as with this family of twelve, a natural curve would emerge of four potential winners, four in the middle and four at the bottom. There would be slight upward and downward mobility from one group to the one next to it, but very seldom would someone rise from the bottom to the top and vice versa.
It wouldn’t be quite this simple, of course, they could mix and match and a middle boy might move up and an upper level girl fall back under certain circumstances. Each of these categories could be slightly bigger or smaller, there could be temporary, single issue alliances for specific purposes, for instances, but the general curve would remain as a primitive caste system that would soon emerge and remain static most of the time. Capitalist societies, too, just like this family, grade on the curve. Even a person who is very, very good at something, say drawing or math, if that skill is not prized or of immediate commercial benefit will not be valued by group market pressures and remain outcast and despised.
Until finally it becomes absurd to suggest that this is a natural, healthy, free market at all because as positions become fixed in place it’s clear that there is nothing inevitable, healthy or natural about it.
Yes, but is it efficient, don’t these favored, upper tier kids achieve beyond what was expected of them? It’s true that sometimes kids from each group, the upper, the middle and the lower occasionally reach their potential, but in fact in such a world more often than not they do not.
The pampered kids at the top soon realize they don’t have to work very hard to maintain their dominance over their downtrodden brethren and become complacent and lazy and thereby invariably fail to ever work diligently enough to become exceptional at anything. The weaker kids also fail to reach their potential because they have never been afforded the possibility of ever doing so. Therefore this social structure is enervating and relatively unproductive at both extremes, top and bottom.
Well how about the middle level kids? They might be thought actually to be the most well adjusted under the highly trying circumstances of their own upbringing, but often they too are ridden with such pent up jealousies, grudges and bad habits and have had to engage in such conniving ways just to survive, that they inherit an entirely twisted view of interpersonal relationships. True some are driven by the unjust situation of their own upbringing to succeed, but often it is not in any idealistic way but rather with an edge, as a by product of taking from others, or of getting even , or trying to prove something or even oppressing those later who have oppressed them. In this way the good they do for some is partially negated by the harm they invariably do others. These attitudes will never lead to the highest endeavors. In a dog eat dog free market system nothing is ever received or given away for free.
Therefore it seems that the capitalistic, free market family structure is bound to be a wanton failure. I wouldn’t recommend it as the best and fairest way to raise your kids unless you want them to hate you forever.
Mainly this is because capitalism, as such, is divorced from all inherently kindly human sentiment, which is never rewarded, but frequently punished by the system. Even when a kid, say in the middle tier, takes sympathy for a lower level kid and shares, the natural reaction of the subset at the top is to resent this and try to punish such behavior if it persists as an oblique threat to their own unfair system of domination. Good and generous behavior, if not stopped early, might begin to spread and may eventually even be demanded of them. Generosity and compassion are actually competitors or even enemies of free market management as they inject all sorts of extraneous considerations into the simple straightforward greed-based math of profit and loss. Capitalism is a way to circumvent traditional moralities not to reflect them.
And don’t even speak of democracy. Capitalism is a sworn, direct enemy of democracy. Democracy is based on equality under god and under our laws. But capitalism is founded on the creation of inequalities of allocation of wealth in which people are ruthlessly categorized and divided into a fairly rigid class based system of winners and losers, situation and resources. These two theories work at complete cross purposes.
The Limits of Capitalism
Naturally no society can be arranged as simply as an individual family and no family would be reared as a society. Still there are a few comparisons which may prove instructive between the two.
For something like what would happen to this imaginary family is exactly what we have seen happening in our country today. For in capitalism, as money breeds power and power money, their partnership soon begins to be abused. So when wealth aligns with power, for they are interconnected, seldom being found apart for long, they will soon begin to squeeze wealth from the society from the top down, including the middle class, as they rapaciously seek unjust advantage over everyone not so well endowed as themselves.
For one thing, capitalists don’t believe in investment in either the nation or its people. The evidence is everywhere around us that totally liberated markets have proven that they cannot be trusted to meet the social needs and necessities of the society at large.
The shortsightedness and greed of markets is legendary. For their money it does not pay a corporation to aid the poor or build a school (except superficially and temporarily for advertising purposes). On the contrary, they erroneously believe that it does serve their interests to either ignore poverty or plunder those who are less able to pay, protest, afford adequate credit, be well educated enough to demand higher wages, seek jobs elsewhere or have the resources to influence our political system to their own benefit.
Proponents of predatory capitalism who persist in saying it is the poor peoples’ own fault that they are poor are perpetuating a lie. The free market absolutely guarantees and mandates a large underclass. A naturally occurring exception which always occurs eventually must be considered not an exception at all but an integral part of the equation. And so to say this is not the system’s fault, that it is natural selection or the fault of the people who haven’t worked as hard as they, is simplistic. Since the percentages are perfectly predictable and the same groups always wind up either being impoverished or enriched it can’t be an accident or lack of effort on the part of the poor people involved but an absolutely preordained function of the design of the system itself.
And like a quilt too short to cover a person, in a system of winners of losers, extravagant hoarded wealth at the top of the population necessarily dries up resources at the bottom which diminishes the future of the country from the ground up which eventually threatens the security and prosperity of the middle class as well.
Look at the shameless credit card business (run by those same people at the banks who have just done their level best to destroy world capitalism) which raises interest rates higher and higher to the point of criminal usury on those least able to pay extra charges. Or, the way our society dangles adequate and affordable health care just out of the reach of an entire segment of society, the way a sadist taunts a chained dog with a rubber steak, merely for the profit and amusement of the upper classes is human torture rather than policy. The same thing applies to reasonable educational opportunities, affordable drug costs, good food, adequate housing and warm clothing. What does it say about a society that is willing to first tolerate and then torment an entire, permanent underclass, merely for the convenience, pleasure, extreme profit and amusement of the very well to do?
What does it say of a society that intentionally allows a quarter of its population to go poorly fed, clothed, educated and housed? If it was a family the parents would be arrested for neglect and their children taken away from them.
The rich grinches’ minions mission in Washington has certainly been to do their part to keep the poor poor poor and in their place. Cheap and inexpensive labor necessitates a wide and broad lower class. Capitalism not only creates a lower class it then tries to expand it and ensure it remains as large and dependent and downtrodden as possible. There is literally a poor tax that can be seen in areas such as the gas tax and food taxes which represent far more of a poor person’s paycheck than one with many more resources. Similarly, the lottery and legalized gambling and so-called “sin” taxes on cigarettes and alcohol fall much more heavily on the poor. Furthermore, tax cuts for the wealthy not only unjustifiably enrich them directly but also dry up our ability to afford social programs and serves the dual (and desirable to them) purpose of widening the gap between rich and poor to dangerous and anti-democratic levels of unfairness.
If this underclass is the cost we must pay for the great luxury of a few multi-billionaires in our midst I would say the price is not worth the benefit. The extreme societal divisions and prejudices which result are far more costly than they are worth. They have become an indulgence we can no longer afford. A society that is very efficient in its management of goods and services, but which by design, is absolutely promiscuous in its waste of human beings can only be considered callous, mean spirited and inimical to its own peoples’ welfare. Most rational humans would imagine that people are a nation’s most valuable commodity, but capitalism has had a bad history of treating people badly, even as expendable, as mere production costs or overhead, to be paid as little as possible then disregarded without another thought as to their well being.
The strength of a country is not in 500 of its most wealthy people. A nation is only as strong as its weakest citizens. Extravagantly wealthy people are a nation’s burden, not its glory. They are an embarrassment to us and a sign of our decline rather than a sign of a healthy nation. They become as caricatures of hard working people and honest citizens. Money to them is like a drug, the more of it they have the more of it they want. Psychologically these titans of Wall Street are not that far removed from crack heads in back alleys. Once they are addicted to the crack of money they will commit any crime to keep its flow from being cut off.
This amoral and unreasoning greed is the real reason that more and more of the nation’s extra resources are spent on remedial things, such as law enforcement and new prison construction to combat crime bred by poverty and drug dependence; reeducation and adult literacy programs because of a faltering educational system and far greater medical costs that might have been prevented with better health care availability and a better nourished underclass. All these costs are not only borne by tax funded government programs but by businesses which then pass their costs on to the public which, as additional costs, make us less competitive in the world, while decreasing the disposable incomes of day to day living at home.
Positive investment in health, education and welfare rather than negative expenditures to try to clean up the messes made necessary by the lack of positive investment, to combat these social ills before they arise, would at one and the same time be far less expensive and lead to a much healthier and well adjusted society. So not only will it cost far less to help prevent and alleviate the causes of these problems than to continue to put up with them and fight them later when they have become unmanageable, it is the right, proper and most efficient way to do things.
These are old lessons that were learned in the 1930’s and forgot by the 1980’s. Rules of thrift, hard work, saving for a rainy day, not living beyond your means, the value of universal education and social responsibility toward others, have all been bleached and brainwashed from our leaders’ minds. But nothing is perfect and so by the late seventies some of our social welfare system needed refurbishment and overhaul and reform. However, the choices the conservative capitalist leaders in charge of our government at that time made were astonishingly naïve, greedy and shortsighted. As if they had never read a book or walked out of doors in their lives, they decided to pretend that all social services were unnecessary, had never been needed and were entirely harmful to the people who received them and of no benefit to the greater society whatsoever. As stupid and harmful and self-serving as this evaluation was and as utterly as it has failed, these same people, or their intellectual heirs, are the same ones fighting health care and education reform and investment on infrastructure to this very day. All this long after their own shortsightedness, selfishness and wrong-headedness have proven so disastrous for all of us. A generation of progress and investment that might have been made has been squandered in debt, cultural devolution and wasted lives.
Public investment in health care and education and welfare to alleviate these problems is not only a moral necessity and governmental responsibility but the best and most rudimentary route to a healthy, well ordered society and an enduringly prosperous nation. Therefore even on their own terms, as hard eyed realists and pragmatists of what best affects the bottom line, unfettered, rapacious capitalism to the exclusion of all else fails. A simplest cost benefit ratio easily proves this.
But in this country we have become capitalists to a fault, or to too many faults. If one freedom is allowed all must be, even if freedom to some Americans primarily means to financially oppress and victimize other Americans.
So because art and pornography sometimes share the human form as medium both must be allowed and protected. Because guns may be used for hunting and to arm an entirely mythical militia they must be made available cut rate to any real street punk terrorist thug and school shooter who might want to gun someone down. Because drug companies are profit oriented and curing poor people hurts their profit margins, poor people must be allowed to suffer and die for want of a few bucks to get an overpriced prescription filled.
To protect a right which is no where near to being infringed we must allow a multitude of crimes to flourish. Because any good may be somehow theoretically threatened all ills must be allowed. So to “protect” the right of someone to shoot a deer in season whose right is not even in dispute, we allow gangs and drugs dealers and psychos to inflict massive harm and havoc on our society far in excess of what is tolerated in any other civilized nation on earth.
Similar situations occur in regard to government social programs. Clearly if well run they may nip in the bud a variety of ills with small cost that if not addressed grow much larger and can only be addressed far more expensively later. Yet the same people who may nit pick various ills and minor injustices that occur in connection with social programs and therefore regard these models as fatally, unworkably flawed, profess to be unable to see all the manifold problems that accompany uncontrolled free markets and capitalism.
So some people are perfectly livid that a lady can sue a fast food chain because she has spilt hot coffee on herself and convinces a jury to give her a one time only award of a million or so for her own carelessness. But the same people disgusted at this one time only legal anomaly don’t blink an eye at the ingrained corruption of oil companies in bed with the OPEC cartel, impoverishing us all by billions with exorbitant and unjustifiable prices with no free markets forces anywhere in sight to restrain them, while enriching our enemies and polluting the entire planet with far reaching unpredictable environmental consequences.
On a scale of outrage one is infinitely greater than the other but somehow become equated when it serves the purposes of those making money on the oil markets to pretend the real problem is not with capitalist excesses but with a miniscule assault on capitalism by a single individual and one run away jury. Therefore the major outrage is overlooked while the minor one is decried by all the great conservative capitalist powers that be.
And both sides in debates, when the two grand titles of Capitalism and Socialism, easier for people to generalize about than explain or invoke than understand, are used; always consider them to be absolutes, of a whole cloth, indivisible. Therefore a society must be either all capitalist or all socialist, without modification, nuance or restraint. Capitalism in a nation therefore means that, like the family in the prologue with which I began this piece, every facet of its interlocking interrelationships must be marketized. Where socialism requires that every aspect of life be entirely socialistic. In fact, like a family every well run nation must be composed of both elements, as no society may be either all one or all the other, they have to be blended. Any society which is all socialist or communist or all capitalist can only turn into a harmful caricature of itself.
There are ample examples of communist societies that met this exact fate. They became so socialized that they became paralyzed. Now unfortunately over the last thirty years we have become a horrid example of what happens when a nation becomes too dangerously enamored of entirely unregulated free markets. Our free markets left all the details of actually managing our society underfunded and undone, before they themselves eventually collapsed under the weight of their own corruption, stupidity and unregulated greed.
The irrationality of trying to mange a capitalistic society without management and without controls, “trusting” it to do the right and moral things is an absurdity every bit as obvious as parents trying to raise their children with a dog eat dog materialistic environment as their only familial philosophy. Callousness and cruelty are inbred in capitalism. Once bland devotion to money, material goods and efficient corporate structure replace basic human ethics, individuals become increasingly divorced from their own moral and patriotic responsibilities. Ethics and compassion must then be imposed from without, demanded by strong churches or enforced by selfless politicians. We have had neither strong nor moral churches nor selflessly democratic members of congress for some time.
After all no moral person with an abundance of food in their possession coming upon a starving person would hesitate to share it. No one would force the starving person to fill out a questionnaire first to justify what they had done with their life to this point to prove whether they deserved food necessary to continue to live or not. Few humans would be that insanely heartless.
Yet that is what our society does. A hard core capitalist will not share food with a starving person unless that person can find a way to pay for it. Unless a capitalist can make a buck on a dying person by saving them they will let them die. This is the institutionalized cruelty of our society of which some are so proud.
No one but a murderer, presumably, would deny medicine to a heart attack patient who had just fallen to the floor clutching their chest in pain when the medicine is sitting on the table right next to them. But a disembodied corporation, a drug company or HMO, does the exact same thing by denying affordable heart care medication or timely service to thousands or millions or people yearly thereby causing a significant proportion of them to suffer unnecessarily for years, and finally drop dead in silence far away out of our sight at different times and places all over the country, it is accepted and acceptable. In fact it is considered praiseworthy by capitalists everywhere, and judged regrettable but necessary by its queasy defenders. We are assured that this extraordinary inhumanity is the price we must pay for free markets. Free markets demand market discipline and if an elderly person often must choose between money spent on medicine or on food, because they can’t have both, so be it. This is the devil’s bargain we must accept, we’re solemnly assured, because this rigidity is the price we must pay for free markets. Therefore if the greater good is served, by letting the little people die in despair and alone we have no choice but to not interfere in the workings of the free market system. It is not our fault or responsibility. Cruelty becomes not only necessary but admirable and its soulless, money grubbing practitioners heroes and the leaders of our country.
In fact any nation which fails to provide the necessities of food, health care, education, housing and clothing on an affordable, accessible basis to all its people, to afford them the opportunity for a healthy prosperous life and a legitimately attainable pursuit of happiness, must be thought of as a failure to its own premise. Whatever its economic system calls itself, it is a failure. Its enablers, its government, its institutions, its complicit churches, its private citizens are all guilty of betraying the very principles and purpose for which the nation was founded.
It is clearly unconstitutional and un-American to allow Americans to go hungry or homeless, without health care or good education in the richest country in the world when each citizen is declared to be equal both under god and under our laws. To say that this society doesn’t work but that it’s due to market forces and so there is nothing we can do about it, as if this should outweigh all moral considerations and constitutional responsibilities is a bizarre non justification of an unacceptable fact.
This nation hasn’t a right to judge its citizens as to their worth. We are of, by and for the people without regard for circumstance, birth or wealth. Neither life, liberty nor happiness may be denied any one due to “market forces” anymore than due to simple prejudice or greed or crime or injustice, which are often conveniently hidden just barely under the surface of these inimical market forces. Market forces really just mean the greed and avarice of a few of our least reputable, even if its richest, citizens are being allowed by our own government to plunder and victimize the rest of society.
No one is suggesting the end of fair capitalism, it is unparalleled in its efficiency in providing goods and services to the most people at best costs. If capitalism worked affectively to alleviate all of our societal problems, many of which are directly attributable to it, no one would have any complaint. But it does not service all the people all the time and only fools, crooks and immoralists can claim that it does.
Therefore it becomes of the duty of a free government constituted to serve all its people without regard for their financial standing to ameliorate all these problems or neglect and deprivation where they arise. This is done through sound social policy and effective public programs. If you want to call this socailsim, fine, call it a little red wagon or a purple tailed dragon, if you want. We the people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and these are things which predatory capitalism often seeks to deny a significant portion of our population. In that circumstance it is incumbent on government to intervene only to the extent it needs to - for it’s true that government overreaction can be as counterproductive as its inactivity - to alleviate these moral failures, social ills and societal shortfalls. To smooth its rough edges and control its unprincipled aspects and arrest its miscreants.
This is not even worthy of a moment’s debate.
Epilogue
The reach of this piece is too limited to take much beyond our shores. But consider that our capitalistic system through it has many flaws in our country, because it is so powerful as the world’s economic engine, contributes singularly and disproportionately on a much, much broader scale in contributing to these same problems globally. Though our own domestic problems are deeply troubling, there they help to produce millions of people who annually die of starvation and disease for lack of even the most rudimentary health care and medicine and available food which, if simple dollar figures were the only issue, the rest of the world could easily afford to provide.
Historically, because they have always been in nationalistic competition, no nation has ever worried about the economy of any other nation but to want it to be weaker than is own. Nations have regularly plundered and stole from each other as a principle of state. Those times have changed. The world is so interconnected now that any crisis which affects any country, sooner or later, in ways large and small, will affect them. Therefore, pure predatory capitalism which seeks to rip other countries of their resources without giving anything of equitable worth back, are gone for good. Yet capitalists have not yet figured this out and will continue to pursue the same old predatory ways until they are stopped.
There is a correlation here though it is hard to strictly quantify. But consequences for bad acts grow concentrically and become more severe the father they spread from point of origin. Consider the global financial crisis for a ready example. The last ones being hurt by this fiasco are generally the ones most responsible for creating it. Wall Street, which caused it, is being bailed out by everyone else instead of the other way around. So for every billionaire we suffer with here you may have millions world wide suffering as a consequence from every pestilence imaginable. This is the deadly math of uncontrolled capitalism when not mitigated by a much stronger moral philosophy and sound ethical and practical policies to guide it.
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