Giving Capitalism a Conscience
Dr. Roger Ray
August 28, 2024
Those of you who became adults in the 1970’s, as I did, may recall this famous book, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler; actually, by Alvin Toffler and his wife, Adelaide Farrell, but in 1970 women didn’t always get the credit they deserved.
The premise of the book is that our society was suffering from a kind of psychological shock that came from the world changing too fast.
One is forced to wonder what Toffler and Farrell would have to say about the third decade of the 21stcentury. News is happening so fast this year that I wonder what journalists will do when they have to start going out and trying to find stories rather than having news raining down on them like a ton of bricks every day? But I want to try to pull the camera lens back a bit today and take a longer look at history rather than being drawn down into the particulars of our current wars, political elections, and the threat and promise offered by technology, especially AI.
My first memories of my family’s evening ritual was to eat a very early dinner so that we could gather around the black and white television in the den to listen to Walter Cronkite telling us what was happening in the world. There were no 24 hour news stations back in those days. Initially there wasn’t even an hour of news. Cronkite had 30 minutes every weekday evening to tell us what had happened that day whether it was the assassination of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr. The moon landing got extended coverage but most days we got a pretty cursory view of things but always including a death toll from the war in Vietnam.
The reason given for that seemingly endless war was to stop the spread of communism. To a certain extent, maybe it was, since China and the United States were using North and South Vietnam to fight a proxy war against one another that was finally settled, oddly enough, by ping pong; which is a story far too long to go into now.
Suffice it to say that for most of our lives, politicians have at least pretended to be engaged in a battle between capitalism and communism or communism’s little sister, socialism. Most of the conversation around these economic systems has been carried on by people who have no idea what they are talking about though that rarely seems to matter to them. When a politician suggests that state universities should be tuition free, someone will always claim that is socialism, or if they are really mad about it, they will call it communism, even though very few people would ever suggest that tuition free kindergarten through high school is a socialist plot.
No one could win a local election if they started calling all school teachers socialists even though they would be fairly accurate if they did so. Our public schools are supported by taxing citizens, whether they have kids in school or not, to pay for our schools which, at its most basic level, makes our school system a socialist system. As is our congress, senate, supreme court, and our president, whose salaries are paid out of the taxes collected from citizens. But then, the largest budget item in any city is the municipal police so our police, our fire fighters, our highway departments, are all socialist, as is our army, navy, air force, and marines.
We tell ourselves that we are a capitalist country but a whole lot of our economy is based in a socialist system, and, in fact, our capitalist society wouldn’t make much profit if the socialist system of roads, police, fire fighters, and the whole matter of federally managed banking and commerce didn’t make their capitalist enterprise possible.
But the misunderstanding really goes farther than that. Regardless of whether your salary is derived from tax dollars, if you are working to support yourself with a salary from an employer, whether that is Walmart or Amazon or Ford Motor Company, you are not a capitalist. You are labor. You are working for a salary which you use to make a house payment, buy groceries, and provide clothing and transportation to your family. Sure, your pension funds may be invested in stocks, but you are not a capitalist. A capitalist is someone who derives their living from the investment of capital. The engineer at Apple who is designing the next iteration of your iPhone is not a capitalist, but Paris Hilton is a capitalist.
The Hilton family isn’t engaged in changing the sheets in hotel rooms or even working at the front desk handing out room keys. They are the owners of great wealth, and they derive a lavish lifestyle from their investment of their capital.
Because the words “communism” and “socialism” have been used like curse words in our political discourse, we have come to accept that capitalism is an assume American value like mom, the flag, and apple pie. Whenever someone starts to criticize Capitalism, they are setting themselves up to be labeled a socialist and by that, to be discarded as being either unAmerican, or unaware, or crazy.
The most famous proponent of more socialist values in the way in which America uses capitalism is the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, who has made two runs at the Democratic nomination for president, the first in 2016, and the second in 2020. He is even older than Joe Biden so I don’t think that we will see him running for office again, but he is still writing best-selling books which is an odd thing for a socialist to be doing, since he is now a multi-millionaire based on his book sales. Capitalism has some funny quirks to it. I just got my annual royalties check for my three books that are still in print, and don’t worry folks, I’m still not a capitalist!
But Bernie was sidelined in both of his runs for the Democratic nomination, largely because he was publicly maligned as being crazy. And it wasn’t just Trump calling him “Crazy Bernie,” but leading Democrats said a lot of the same things, including Hillary Clinton claiming that no one likes Bernie and that he was driving her crazy.
I accept that Bernie Sanders is a bit eccentric and there have been a number of odd twists and turns in his career but, for me, Bernie has nothing to do with the good or bad dimensions of the changes to capitalism that he was suggesting. In fact, if we took the issue one by one and put them to a popular vote, I believe that all of them would pass with majority approval.
The issue that seems to get most politicians all twisted up has been his suggestion that we have Medicare, or something like it, for all Americans. Because the whole healthcare industry is such a cash cow for billionaires and a source of political donations for both Republicans and Democrats, both sides of the political fence insisted that his suggestion was unworkable and, in short, crazy. So crazy in fact, as one popular meme has noted, it has only been successfully implemented in 32 of the 33 western democracies in the world.
When Bernie lost the nomination to Biden in 2020, he met with President Biden to discuss the issues that Bernie was trying to campaign on. There were 10 of them and he and Biden agreed on half of them. They agreed that the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15 an hour. They agreed that Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. They agreed on the need to be more aggressive about combating climate change, and even on lowering the Medicare enrollment age to 60. And finally they agreed that we should stop using private prisons and detention centers that make a profit off of incarcerating Americans.
Does any of that sound crazy to you? Again, Biden even agreed on those issues, though it is evident that he will leave office without having accomplished these things but, there is least moral agreement. But what are the five crazy things they couldn’t agree on?
Of course, they didn’t agree on a Medicare for all plan, even though most Americans would vote for it in a New York minute.
They didn’t agree on legalizing marijuana, even though this is happening in state by state votes, even in the darkest of red states. They couldn’t agree on forgiving all student loans, though Biden has certainly tried to take steps in that direction. They couldn’t agree on making state universities tuition free although 24 nations have already done it and the list is growing every year. And among Americans, this would be a wildly popular initiative, maybe even more popular than making marijuana legal!
And the final issue where they could not ready agreement was imposing a wealth tax on billionaires. So, I ask you, even in these issues that Biden and the Democratic party couldn’t support, does any of that sound crazy to you? It might hurt the people who make big political donations but, should we be letting people buy our elections and public policies anyway?
The profit motive inherent to capitalism can inspire innovation. It can spur people on to hard work, saving, and increasing the total wealth of the world but if it is not governed in a way that keeps redistributing that wealth, the greed that drives capitalism can lead to hoarding of resources. There are lots of ways of trying to describe how this is happening but one simple concrete way that Bernie Sanders likes to explain it is just this simple: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett control as much wealth as the bottom half of this 330 million person country.
The existence of poverty in this wealthy nation would presume that even though we are the most wealthy nation in the history of the world, there still is not enough to lift everyone out of poverty. That, men and women, is simply not true.
The problem is a convoluted tax structure that, year after year, has been designed by the wealthy to serve the interests of the wealthy. This allows them to hoard so much of the nation’s wealth that they literally could not spend it all in a hundred lifetimes. What creates poverty? Not a shortage of resources; poverty is caused by hoarding.
These three familiar billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, have already designed and built space ships so that they could personally take a ride in space and there are five more with similar plans in the works. I understand that capitalism will create multi-millionaires who will own multiple houses, yachts, and every luxury imaginable but should our tax system even allow someone to become a billionaire? Is there any reason why any one person should be able to hoard so much wealth that they can shoot themselves into space for a brief joyride when many of their employees can’t afford reliable transportation to get them to, just for example, the Amazon warehouse, where they work?
The wealthy can afford tax avoidance schemes like offshore bank accounts, and outrageous tax deductions for things like corporate jets, but the single mom making your coffee at Starbucks doesn’t have an off shore account. There is not a scarcity of money in this country but there is a clear paucity of compassion and logic. This problem has become much worse in the past decade, with even the majority of government spending to get us through the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 ending up enriching billionaires while many Americans lost income or lost their jobs entirely. Those two years of the pandemic saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class up to the wealthy than any other time in our history. Why was it even legal to profit off of a pandemic that killed a million Americans?
While we were still engaged in fighting in World War II, in 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 2nd Bill of Rights in his state of the union address. Franklin acknowledged that the Bill of Rights that are the first ten amendments to our constitution, while important, had failed to guarantee freedom to Americans nor to provide for their ability to actually engage in a pursuit of happiness. If you are so poor that you cannot gain access to safe housing, needed medical care, food, and education, then you are not really free.
Everyone who has had to endure abusive working conditions out of fear of unemployment knows that they were not really free. Roosevelt said, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Of course, he was not able to implement all of these goals and we have not finished the job in the 80 years since he spoke these words but he insisted that every American has a right to meaningful employment and that such employment should pay enough to provide for safe housing, food, medical care, and recreation.
And that farmers specifically should be guaranteed sufficient prices for their crops to provide them with an adequate living. And that every small business should be protected from large monopolies and unfair competition. He also named access to education and protections in old age from illness, hunger, or homelessness.
He saw the end of the war was in sight but he was aware that bringing all of those in the service home to a nation that could not assure them of either education or employment begs the question of what we were fighting for in the first place.
You are not really fighting for freedom if you are going to come home and have to sleep under a bridge. In the years since this 2nd Bill of Rights was suggested, we have seen Walmart and Amazon gobble up the marketplace and shut down almost all locally owned retail stores. Family farms have been consolidated into corporate operations so that far subsidies that were instituted to save family farms is almost all going to the five major food corporations in America rather than to farmers.
Do you know who the largest owner of farmland in America is? It is Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame. Bill Gates is not a farmer, but he owns 269,000 thousand acres of farmland. Why?
I’m not suggesting that Gates has any nefarious plans for all of this farmland. I accept his explanation that his intention is simply to make the farms more productive and profitable, which is what rich people do, but it is still driving farmers off of the land and consolidating wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people which, clearly, isn’t sustainable.
Capitalism, if we allow it to, will destroy capitalism. In order to sustain a market, you cannot only think about what is best for the next quarterly returns. To have an economy, you have to have consumers who can afford to buy things. Wages have to be sufficient for people to do more than survive. There is more to life than just going to work. If it is possible to end poverty in America then there remains no moral justification for not doing it.
That’s just my opinion, it just so happens than I am right.
