After reading SethRightmer's diary of the same title earlier this month, I wanted to take another spin at it, especially after the events of the last week or so.
While I agree with much of what is in that diary, I felt that there are larger issues that we need to start talking about before our society unravels. I believe that it is time to call capitalism into question. Not whether it is going to eat itself (it very well could, as Nouriel Roubini pointed out) or whether it is in our national self-interest to adopt socialist policies to compete effectively.
I believe we should call it into question because it is immoral and dangerous.
One could obviously write a book on this, so bear with me. Here goes.
The economic system is nothing but a tool, to meet human needs, beginning with food and shelter and then progressing up the scale. Arguably the capitalist system manufactures its own needs to keep people in a state of dissatisfaction, so they will strive for more money to purchase more goods that will somehow fill the need (but never quite seems to).
However, we have made the economic system a god, where all things must be sacrificed for the good of the economy. The priests of this religion say that what must be sacrificed is care for the elderly, the young, the poor, and infirm, the air, the water....everything. Including jobs for workers, as labor costs too much as an input to production. It is like Moloch, demanding the sacrifice of everything we should hold dear to feed itself.
And one of the greatest sacrifices of all is what capitalism turns us into. The ideal person for our economic system is a rational, self-interested agent. The system forces you to be that way. Anyone who has worked for a corporation knows that you have to basically regard peers as competitors and those less senior as expendable, fungible objects if you are to prosper. The corporation has been legally structured to maximize profits at the expense of any other objective, and thus every other form of normal human relationship is condemned as "not professional."
This is where capitalism must be questioned. It is immoral to ask us to treat each other like objects. It is immoral to ask us to cast aside our elderly, our young, our infirm, our poor, our neighborhoods, our small businesses, our air, our water, our jobs, so that the system may function (and of course the unstated corollary, so that those who have risen to the top of the system may continue to prosper).
When you look at the system, that we have made a god, it robs us of our humanity and it literally makes us insane, as it turns us into sociopaths by any textbook definition. This is why it is so easy for the elites to break the law: it has no meaning for them, as they have fully internalized the demands of the corporation to maximize (personal) profit. It is merely an exercise in risk management. And when the elites demonstrate that they have no respect for law and that the system will not punish them for their lawbreaking, it is only a matter of time for the rest of society to internalize that message and realize that breaking the law is for them also just an exercise in risk management. When even formal religion is perverted to carry the message of the economic system, the transformation is complete. Every source of moral value is reduced to a single, "rational" self-centered imperative.
One does not have to look hard to see the fundamental internal contradiction here. The economic system relies on laws for its own functioning. Contracts and property rights must be respected. And yet, the system teaches us that we are to maximize profit above all else. Without non-economic systems to maintain the integrity of laws, the economic system will devour itself. Without society -- which called the economic system into being, and which should control its operation instead of exalting it into godhood -- the economic system cannot continue to function, and civilization itself may collapse as people turn on each other like sharks in a blood frenzy.
It is time for us to make this point, and to relegate the economic system back to the role of a tool that we can control, and shape, and guide, to meet human purposes: to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the young, the old, and the infirm, be good stewards of our natural resources, and provide opportunities for people to fulfill their destinies by developing whatever creative talents they may have. Utopian? Not at all. The more countries have begun to operate this way (Scandinavia being a prime example), the happier people are. And it is time for us to say loudly that exalting our economic system into godhood has destroyed our political system, our very society, and turned us all into slaves that fear and hate each other. This is not the world we want to live in, and we can change it. By putting society back in command of the economic system.
Thanks for reading.