No one can earn
a million dollars honestly.
William
Jennings
Bryan, 1860 – 1925,
an
American lawyer, statesman, and politician, three times the Democratic
Party nominee for President of the United States.
The decadent
international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found
ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not
beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the
goods.
-----
Capitalism is the
astounding belief that the most wickedest [sic] of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of
everyone.
John Maynard
Keynes, 1883 – 1946,
a British
economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a
major impact
on modern economic and political theory, as well as on
many
governments’ fiscal policies.
So far, we have noted many deficiencies in the
capitalism which we practice. The
purpose behind such a look is to encourage thought and
action about how to make capitalism work better.
So we look at more deficiencies.
Have you wondered why libertarians want little or no
government intervention? History
is replete with examples of how those who accumulate wealth keep
accumulating it by ensuring that the law favor their continued accumulation
of wealth. Why do libertarians
not see this?
They suffer from the same problem from which the rest
of us suffer. We are creatures
of our experiences and our fears, which means that our interpretation of
reality is naturally biased. Each
of us has experiences in her or his subculture.
Some subcultures favor individual enterprise over community
cooperation; other subcultures
favor community cooperation over individual enterprise.
Relatively speaking, some are ethical or spiritual, others are
opportunistic or material.
Fears? Just
as I am inclined to find people who share my views—in part because I am
fearful and do not want to confront the possibility that my values might be
relative instead of universal—libertarians find like-minded people.
When like-minded people speak to one another, they reinforce their
values. They find it hard to
understand the values of others. Even
if I were to tell a libertarian that laissez-faire
capitalism preceded government regulations, meaning that the abuses of
capitalism came before the burden of regulations, the libertarian would
insist that the best form of government would be little or no government.
However, is little or no government in the public
interest? We in the
United States
are rather permissive with regard to businesses.
As a result, we have periodic catastrophes, like the Citigroup loss
of earlier this month:
NEW
YORK -- The sub-prime mortgage crisis hit Wall Street with full fury Tuesday
as Citigroup Inc. reported a nearly $10-billion fourth-quarter loss, and
both Citigroup and Merrill Lynch & Co. got cash infusions to shore up
their financial stability.
Citigroup
wrote down by $18.1 billion the value of sub-prime-related holdings on its
books, slashed its dividend 41% and said it would eliminate 4,200 of its
roughly 300,000 jobs worldwide in what is expected to be the opening volley
in a series of layoffs by the company this year. ...
Los Angeles
Times, January 16, 2008
In the next part of this essay, we will look at ways in
which capitalism influences public policy.
January 31, 2008