I'm a part of various online 'groups' if you could call them that. Really they are just groups of people with vaguely similar ideas getting together and chatting on reddit and other forums (hopefully on steemit soon ). In these discussions there are usually many people who 'get' that we are in a predatory system and that it is not going to end well for a lot of people. For example, millions of students in the U.S. are eyeballs in debt due to taking out school loans that they will not be able to find a job to repay in the future. Millions of people have hospital debt that they will need to work decades to repay, due to both the size of the bill, and the paltry sum they get paid. Yet, through all of this, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the problem is and the method on solving it. So what is the fundamental problem?
Love of False Ideas
If you loved Santa Claus as a child, chances are you got happy thinking about Christmas time. You pondered over your gifts and what it would be like opening them, you even probably said a little prayer to Santa in gratitude for his upcoming winter bounty. However, all of that goodwill and feeling was based on a lie: the existence of Santa. Capitalism is Santa for adults. The idea that free market capitalism was an idyllic paradise in the past, and if we could only just get back to that and return prosperity for the common man! That free market capitalism brought 'innovation and technology' to the masses and for such should be lauded and worshiped.
This is the same manner of wide-eyed naive love that children display towards Santa. And, in the same vein as the Santa myth, you have plenty of people, adults, who are participating in the trickery of these other adults, like parents tricked their kids by 'leaving cookies for Santa' etc. Except now, they leave milk and cookies for Capitalism.
They extol the virtues of the system, they talk about the latest gadget that it supposedly put in your hand and they wax wistfully for the days when a true capitalist could do what they needed to do to get the job done without all that 'regulation'. This is not to take one side or the other of the capitalism vs. govt regulation debate, because my position is that they are fundamentally the same side; rather, this comment is to show some of the myths that have grown up around this idea.
So What's the Truth?
The truth is that capitalism is a brutal, inefficient and destructive system. Those people who talk about capitalism and its many benefits also fail to mention the millions of people killed by and for capitalist purposes. Smedley Butler wrote many decades ago in 'War is a Racket':
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an
average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the
pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly
profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take
leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were
$3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather
returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General
Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over
$800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per
cent.
This is capitalism. Capitalism needs war, death and destruction. This is because people do not take kindly to having to move in order for a large company to extract the wealth of the resources under their feet. People don't just give the rights to the oil in the ground, rubber in the trees or fertile soil that is their heritage over. So they must be killed. And the controlled media back home must be given a story to pass on to the sleeping public. This is not to mention the standard of living under capitalism is far less than it was before capitalism. This is hard to believe but easy to prove. Before capitalism, a man would work for what he needed for him and his family. For example, if you needed a house, you built one. And if built well, you had a house for the rest of your life. It didn't cost you 100k or 200k, because you bought your own materials and put it together with friends and family.
Capitalism Is a Form of Wealth Extraction
Or food. A man would grow enough food for him and his family, no big deal. Once it was done you were done. Agriculture is hard work, but when you have a limited number of mouths to feed you have a limited amount of work to accomplish. Not so in capitalism. In capitalism you work until you can't work anymore. Our modern system has determined 8-hours of your day to be the length of work you can stand before productivity falls. Do you see this? They work you as much as they can until you can't take it anymore. In places like Bangladesh and China, they work you even harder. People live like animals in cages and their only purpose is to rise, work and repeat. None of the pursuits that cause the human spirit to soar are present, because that would negatively affect the bottom-line, and capitalism is all about the bottom-line.
The truth is that capitalism has ruined millions of lives. The lives of children forced to work 12-hour days in factories with dangerous equipment designed for maximum efficiency, while safety is an after-thought. The lives of rural people who were forced or enticed to live in crowded cities. This crowding, another side-effect of capitalism by the way, is detrimental to human mental health and spirit. Everything that destroys the human soul is promoted in capitalism. The last time I went to the beach there were scores of young people who knew no better staring at a screen. When a rare fish would pop out of the water, most didn't notice. Those who did, awkwardly attempted to take a photo of it, only to miss both the event and the photo. Capitalism is not a great good but a great evil. Something that has fundamentally transformed the way humans live for the profit and benefit of a small minority at the top.
If you agree, I invite you to upvote and share why in the comments. Of course, if you disagree I REALLY invite you to share why in the comments. I'm almost certain that I can change your mind, so let's have a constructive discourse!
I agree with you that capitalism has many nasty, grotty sides when taken to the extreme. Especially as you have in America. There's more debt in existence than actual money. This traps people in jobs and poverty.
But it doesn't have to be that way. You can default. You can opt oout. You can go off grid. You can create your own solutions. Pay cash for things, keep some bitcoin if you can. Living a relatively simple life is probably easier now than it has ever been.
The only reason the system keeps on going is because people play by it's rules and take it very seriously.
Furthermore, all these injustices point the way for new, better solutions and innovations. And hopefully intelligent, helpful communities like this here on steem can bring that future together.
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Thanks for the comment! One of the things that I didn't mention in this post because it was getting a little long is the fact free market capitalism and corporatism are one and the same. Those who defend capitalism often offer this as a defense: "What we have is corporatism, free-market capitalism, however, is better we just don't have it now." What they fail to realize is that free-market capitalism is just the first stage of corporatism. Just like stage 1 cancer and stage 4 cancer are the same disease at different states of progression, so too does corporatism require free-market capitalism in the beginning. That's how corporations grow in the first place. So imagine a completely ideal free-market: you have all the freedom from regulation you want, there are no powerful monopolies to prevent you from bringing your good or service to market. What happens?
Eventually, after some decades maybe, competition stops or slows and monoliths form. Why must this happen? Because every competition comes to an end, there are always winners and losers, and there always will be so long as it costs resources to compete (which will always be the case in a monetized economy). So these monoliths gain more and more power, and due to their economic strength they are increasingly able to bend the ear of whatever govt is in power. Whether its a democracy or totalitarian regime, corporations represent great power because they affect so many people who work for them and depend on their goods and services. So eventually, the government becomes the corporations as its more efficient to operate as an even greater monolith from the corporations point of view. Why act as a separate entity when it is cheaper to be a part of 'the system'?
And here we are.
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"Compare to what" is always the question we should keep in mind.
Children worked since the beginning of time, not because of capitalism but because if they didn't they would starve to death. The fact that kids don't have to work is only possible because the productive capacity of each individuals have increased tremendously through capital investment in the factors of production. We have now the luxury of not having to send children to work. Pass a law in a poor country that make kid work illegal and death will follow. (or they'll end up in the black market for prostitution)
Almost everywhere where private property, rule of law and an ease of starting a business has been applied prosperity followed.
Almost everywhere central planning and forced distribution has been applied, starvation and destruction have followed.
This is empirically true. Singapore, Hongkong, Chile, the US, New Zealand, Estonia, etc. are just a few example of what happen when you follow those basic principles.
Could it be better? Of course.
Here are the only options I see now:
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Hey thanks for the comment. The problem with your viewpoint is that you believe that such conditions are necessary. You state that 'children worked since the beginning of time'. Yes this is true, but it is also fallacious. I say that because my point wasn't that children worked, but that the conditions in which they worked were far more dangerous, and detrimental to their health and physical as well as spiritual development now than in the past. For example, when children worked in the past what were they doing?
They weren't assembling typewriters or using scalding chemicals to burn the plastics off the precious metals in computers, they were learning husbandry, farming and construction. Valuable skills that would help them throughout their lives. To boot, because there was no profit motive involved, they only did the work that they needed to do, nothing more. In fact, humans had much more leisure time before capitalism than they do now, because the amount of work to be done was much less, it was finite.
In capitalism the work that must be accomplished is infinite as is the growth desired. Of course, we know that growth and work cannot go on forever, yet we live in a system that tries anyway. Government and capitalism are two arms to the same body: Statism. The idea that you can run people's lives from an office far away from them. How does the farmer decide when to quit? When the tasks for that he set for himself to feed his family are accomplished. How does the wage slave decide when to quit? Well, if he's smart he'll NEVER decide to quit because in capitalism if he does he will be on the street and forced into poverty if he takes more than 2 weeks for himself.
Even your comment lightly assumes that because I'm against capitalism that I must be for centralized planning and distribution. This is because, like all good tools of war, capitalism has an effective propaganda machine. You cannot even envision a world without it that is not overcome by 'socialism', and thus you cannot envision your escape from the matrix. Therefore, you plod along wasting your life and time with no hope nor knowledge of a better way.
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It is a mater of terms. In a free market there is no violence. What you describe above is a government controlled market.
Just try to achieve your goals without violence.
I up voted not because I agree, but because of the discussion.
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Hey, thanks for the reply. It seems that you missed the thrust of my point, namely that there is no difference between a 'government controlled market' and a free market. This is for one of two reasons, take your pick.
If its not possible for me to grow wings and fly, then doesn't it make sense to not try to do so? Even if by meditating for example, it were not possible, then wouldn't it behoove me to stop meditating on that concept and find something else to do with my time? If you can never achieve a free market, or alternatively can only achieve one for a tiny amount of time--the rest of which is spent in government controlled markets, then what is the point in bothering? What is the point in holding it as a grand standard? I submit that it is pointless. Especially since we have evidence that people lived much better lives before capitalism than they do now.
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