Trey Smith
There is an article posted at The Guardian, Towards a Fairer Capitalism: Let's Burst the 1% Bubble, whose headline is far meatier than its text. The columnist doesn't really offer any definitive idea of how to make the unfair fair. Me thinks that the primary reason the columnist didn't offer a blueprint is that one does not exist. Capitalism, by its very nature, must be unfair.
It is not an economic theory based on the concepts of community, harmony or balance. No, it's about winners and losers. And the winners are spurred to win ever bigger and bigger pieces of the pie at all costs.
Government can work to achieve a tenuous lessening of the inherent extremes for a short-term period, but the capitalists always will figure a way around government efforts in the long term. It is a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. The government applies a few restraints, the capitalists devise strategies to turn the restraints into mountains of profit and so the government recalibrates the restraints which, in turn, are placed on their heads all over again.
As Joel Bakan makes clear in The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power this pursuit of profit burns everything in its path. No barrier is permanent; it only represents an ankle-high hurdle.
So, while we certainly can work to make capitalism more fair in the near future, it will represent nothing more than a temporary speed bump.
Think differently? Just look at history. Every time we think we have the capitalist class reeled in, they escape to bigger and greener pastures.
There are countries like Sweden and others in Scandinavia that seem to have mitigated many of the negative aspects of Capitalism, while still embracing its basic principals. I don't know specific details though.
ReplyDeleteSocialism would be ideal, but I always thought that humans were too incompetent for pure socialism to work effectively, and that such a system would just collapse over time.
are you thinking of social democracy KaiWen?
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