I just finished reading a post describing the collective unhealthy attitudes of capital and wealth but an important point is being missed in the discussion.
Blasting billionaires into space or crushing them like an empty beer can, or any of dozens of other ill-advised risks such as the nephew of the San Diego Padres owner killing himself in his new Christmas present — an Ariel Atom, on the comes naturally to the inverse brains/money principle. I feel for the kid and I feel for the families, but only to a point.
The entire OceanGate story, I feel, is an allegory for laissez-faire or anarcho-capitalism in general. When we hear people, ostensibly well-capitalized, shouting FREE MARKETS! from every rooftop, not enough (less capitalized) people consider what it means.
It means that the market is left to determine its own intrinsic risk. This means that I could build a car without regard to say, the safety of its occupants, I could, in theory, make any claim I want about its safety, fuel efficiency, or the performance of its brakes, and the market would determine whether this car lives up to the claims I made. If it didn’t accelerate or stop as I claimed, people would simply stop buying the it!
Suppose this car is extremely affordable or appealing on its looks alone — characteristics that would compel buyers to overlook other deficiencies like safety or reliability — and people start dying in accidents. According to anarcho-capitalist theorists, some kind of private court and insurance system is in place to compensate the aggrieved or penalize the liable, although I’ve never read anything that sounds like it would work in real-life or fits into the realm of normal human behavior. And at the very worst, I could build and sell these shit cars, and simply go bankrupt once I’ve made my money, including screwing my investors, as refined by certain orange ex-presidents.
Aristotle said that nature abhors a vacuum, including a vacuum created by the lack of regulations. That is to say that if you create a vacuum of regulations, opportunists with much greater economic and political power will naturally seek to exploit it. If you weaken an environmental regulation, Koch Industries, which lobbied against that reg, will begin dumping waste the minute the rule expires.
Anyone could start selling kid-sized slingshots or 1/4-scale fully-operational 105mm howitzers for home use. And if anyone gets injured, just go bankrupt. Remember — I not only built the device but my lobbyists wrote the legislation that protects me from liability.
All in the name of CAPITALISM!
This is NOT an anti-capitalist screed. Anti-capitalists tend to forget that without it, you wouldn’t have the computer or cellphone upon which you’re reading this. But I don’t think that we progressives carry the logic, of what happens if/when capital is allowed to control every level of government. It’s not a slippery-slope argument because we’re seeing the effects in real time. We call it fascistic but we often don’t consider the real-world implications of how that affects us. Yes, there will be those idiot MAGA demonstrations but we already know they’re suckers doing capital’s bidding for free.
But we are also suckers if we don’t recognize these codewords such as “I believe in capitalism!” coming from the mouths of 99%-ers, or “Regulations = socialism!” as though my right to build a collapsible submarine is infringed by Karl Marx himself…
What does it really mean? Politics has always been under the control of capital: it’s baked right into our Constitution. It’s always been implied but it’s now codified by Citizens United. So forget any notion of using logic, ethics, or faith in humans’ better nature to solve the problem that capital will use any means necessary to acquire more capital, including kill us all once it has enough capital to walk away.
The moral of this post is that we hear the words of the capital that controls the message and the airwaves — we hear them tell us about how regulations will put your company out of business so, Mr. or Ms. Sucker, you wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your employer, right?
FREE LAWN DARTS FOR EVERYONE!