The Set-Up

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.
~ from I'm Starting to Think That the Left Might Actually Be Right by Charles Moore ~

A popular sentiment these days is that our national economy merely has gotten off its rails. The system itself is sound; we only need to tweak it a bit to get it back on course. Conservatives and liberals just disagree on what those tweaks should be.

As Karl Marx noted over a century ago, this thinking is misguided. While capitalism certainly was a step forward from previous economic systems, it contains a fatal flaw. It is structured in such a way that, in time, it will cannibalize itself.

That's what we are seeing now around the world. The push for short-term profits by the few is collapsing the roof and compromising the foundation of the world economy. It looks inevitable that the building will fall into itself and kill most of the people inside. With less people to exploit, the time will come when the wealthy minority will have fewer pawns to move around the chessboard and many of them will fall too.