Is Free Market Capitalism Inherently Greedy and Corrupt.

I do enjoy when the arrogant left opens it's collective mouth to prove it doesn't quite know what it's talking about. I love the spelling errors in this tongue lashing I got when I dared suggest that Camille Paglia was right when she claimed capitalism ended the stranglehold of the aristocracy and "raised the standard of living for the whole world." She even claimed that "capitalism enabled the emancipation of women," to which this guy below responded, "Nonsense!" Here's my friend's agitated comment regarding Ms. Paglia's heresy.

I have found that most right wing people have a mythical believe in Capitalism. When left it it's own and not closely regulated, it screws everyone and crashes the economy. Pure Capitalism has never existed and the closer we get, the more the greed based economy crashes. Socialism in it's pure form as well, has never existed and will fail. Communisum has never existed and is impossible due to human nature. Anyone who mentions Communisum and the US, is a moron and needs to shut up. Best to keep you mouth shut and have people think your stupid vs open your mouth and prove it. We have a system that has socialist tendencies long before Capitalism. Most don't know the Boston Tea Party was a rebellion against the only corporation allowed to work in the US and fact that they were exempt to the Tea Tax. In the early US Corperations were not legal.Ours is a mix of Capitslistic and Socialistic programs, rules and regulations. All to keep the greedy from compleatly cashing out the majority. Balance.  

 

            (Name withheld due to his atrocious spelling. rudeness and rampant logical fallacies)

Well, of course capitalist systems have to be regulated. The idea that those of those on the right want totally unregulated business is a straw man logical fallacy. Nobody I know is claiming unregulated, unfettered capitalism is the best way to go. Most of us believe in original sin. Mentioning communism makes one a moron???? Really. What an arrogant load of crap! Communism is, for most committed socialist, the ultimate socialist Utopia. It was what Marx believe was the ultimate goal of socialism. It was the "Communist" Manifesto, not the Socialist/Capitalist Manifesto, nor even the Socialist Manifesto. If by socialist, you mean people helped the needy and helped each other in the event of disasters, that's not the sole province of socialism. Socialism doesn't mean "charitable". A capitalist nation can choose to set aside some assets to provide help or even things like healthcare, retirement benefits and such if it so chooses and many do. Sweden and Denmark, whose economies are based on capitalist principles do offer certain services and benefits that their people choose to offer.

I'm not sure where this guy got his definition of socialism, but Marx's brand of socialism certainly has nothing to do with charity. Nor does a capitalist economy preclude setting money aside to provide charity to our fellow humans in need if socialism did. In fact, capitalist nations and free market economies lavish more largess on the poor of the world than socialist states ever do. As a career nonprofit fundraiser, I was interested to learn that US churches and private foundations give more money and give it more effectively to impoverished 3rd World Nations than the US Government. A whole lot more of private nongovernmental charity goes for what it was intended to go for instead of like much US government's billions in "Aid" does. Warlords don't get much in the way of private aid. Too hard to embezzle, unlike government pallets of cash the way politicians hand it out.

As to the Boston Tea Party, the protest was against a government sponsored tax that protected a company that was in cahoots with the government. That's exactly the sort of corporatism that progressives claim to be against, but always one of the first things corporations and governments organize when they choose the socialist brand of statism over the sort of government of the people our founders established. Sounds like a great idea, you just can't get people to go along with it unless you point a gun at 'em.

Yes, we regulate corporate greed and lawlessness. If you remember Republican presidents like Grant and Teddy Roosevelt were the first to crack down on corporate pirates. Grant busted members of his own administration when he caught them with their fingers in the till. Capitalist, yes. The trouble with socialists is that they if they do seek to regulate corruption of the free market by massive corporations, they always fold the corruption into the state. With socialists it's government of the state, by the state and for the state. Barack Obama complained that the US Constitution didn't specify the rights of the government, only the rights of the people. That is as it should be. Our system of government was designed so that government is only allowed what power the people grant it.

That is by and large a free market capitalist system. The government's role should be to slap down companies and individuals that use their wealth to protect themselves from competition and protect their markets from competing new small businesses. Too often the advocates of socialism-lite adopt a less obvious nationalization of business and industry under an all powerful state and simply get in bed with the corporations.

After all, when you believe your job is to centrally plan everything, tell people where to live, where to work, what kind of jobs they must do, where they can and cannot travel and all the rest of the controls placed upon us by the benevolent state, it's to your advantage to keep down the number of companies you have to control.  It's a whole lot easier to "manage" a handful of powerful corporations than it is to control hundreds and thousands of small, upstart, fast-moving, flexible and innovative entrepreneurial companies that have little interest in bowing to the all-powerful state. Deals to protect corporations, allows career politicians to become multi-millionaires on a government salary and bureaucrats to have more free time for those 5 martini lunches and vacations in Aruba than they would have if they had to control the Wild Wild West that is a free market economy.

Since the Garden of Eden, it's been all about power. Want to know who's most concerned about their power? Check to see who you aren't allowed to criticize. Check to see which side's rioters are in jail six months later and which were out in a couple of hours despite their being more violent and destructive.

It's not capitalism that "screws everyone and crashes the economy." It's people who interfere with the self regulation of free market;. politicians and political parties who sell themselves to the moneyed upper classes and corporate fat cats and sell out the middle class and working upper class in favor of those who've already made their pile and are willing to bribe, steal and rig the system for their own benefit.

"Too big to fail" was a progressive idea. No free market capitalist believes in that.

It's not "when left to it's own devices" that capitalism fails. It's when propped up by cronies in government that those nasty corporations screw people and wreck the economies. Crony capitalists and their well fed allies in government come to think they are too big to fail and use taxpayer money to save big corporations from failure as they did in 2008 and 2009. Goldman Sachs should have gone down with Lehman Brothers, AIG and all the rest. Instead of letting the markets regulate the greed and corruption our politicians instead protected it. I guarantee if any one of those massive corporations had collapsed of it's own internal rot, there would have been a hundred new companies that would have rushed in to serve those markets.

Free markets, if protected from the bloated bullies of business, will clear out the bad business. Customers simply stop buying their stuff. That's why Chrysler went bust. We should have let them close and kept the market open for new car-makers to step in. Companies that have rested on their inflated laurels pay the price for failing to innovate and to serve their customers. For every failing Sears, Montgomery Wards and JC Penney's, you get an Amazon, Walmart  and a myriad of smaller companies that rise up to serve the customers in that market.

And it's not just the corporations that are greedy. Unions, representing workers have gotten greedy as well and have driven their companies under one after another. If, a while back, you suddenly discovered you couldn't find Twinkies and Ho-Ho's in the store anymore, you can thank their unions that drove the Hostess company down by making the business unprofitable. Much of the failure of the bakery was due to the badly inflated cost of their workforce. Nice work if you could get it, but eventually, the whole rotten edifice collapsed of its own weight and with it those nice retirement plans the union gouged the company for. Ironically, someone did buy the brand and the recipes for Ding-Dongs and such. What they didn't buy were the workers. Meanwhile, conservative bakery, Little Debbie, keeps plugging along by balancing costs and paying their workers a fair but not exhorbitant wage. 

My friend was right in that there has to be some regulation to keep the markets free and fair. It's just not the sort that our friends on the left favor. Progressives took the wrong lesson from psychologists like BF Skinner and Abraham Maslow. They've come to believe and more importantly put into practice, a system that responds to noisy, demanding, misbehaving people by rewarding them in an effort to quiet them. All the while they neglect those that are quietly going about their work and not setting fire to cities and demanding things they can damned well get for themselves. 

All that does is teach the proletariat to be greedy and eventually, the delicate balance between patronizing the proletariat and protecting the "too big to fail" upper class, grows to be too much and it all topples over and goes down like the Tower of Babel. And every day it's looking more and more like the progressive tower to the socialist Utopia may soon topple of its own weight and as Jesus described it, "And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it."

As it's been for more than a year now with CoVid-19, it's better that we avoid the disease that is socialism/statism altogether than to do as John the Revelator put it, and "...drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." With government and corporations, there really is no "safe sex." History tells us that.

© by Tom King