If a system can be manipulated to the benefit of those at its center, and to the detriment of those at its mercy, it will be. Capitalism, by any measure the most effective and durable economic model the world has known, seems unsuited to today’s realities. The threat of world economic collapse is not easily ignored. Pretending that our leading politicians and our smartest economists know how to deal with the current calamity has proven delusional. Capitalism-based economies have collapsed in ways equally obvious to curry salesmen in Mumbai, saki salesmen in Sakura, and shoe salesmen in Cincinnati. Besides, events of the past five months have already transformed our system into something unnamed and unrecognizable.
For example, in an economy where tens of millions of blue-collar workers rely on manufacturing for their incomes, market forces and tax regulations have driven American factories to countries offering low-wage workers. In a system designed to reward success, failed executives receive annual bonuses exceeding the lifetime income of most Americans, as interlocking boards of directors vote breathtaking bonuses for mediocre performance. In an economy where high school graduates learn that the path to success is smart investing, the stock market appears bottomless. Seniors worry about their children and grandchildren’s ability to enjoy reasonably prosperous lives while repaying debt their grandparents bequeathed them. Capitalism’s most doctrinaire supporters propose bank bailouts, mortgage relief, and unemployment extensions. Huge numbers of America’s hardest workers make too little to afford dental work, a car, or education for their children (read Susan Ehrenreich). Most fundamentally, since 1980 the nation’s wealth has migrated to the top of the economic mountain, leaving an echoing sucking sound in the valley. Banks won’t lend, giant automakers threaten bankruptcy without government assistance, and the world’s largest insurance company accepts an $85 billion down payment from the government to repair self-inflicted wounds. Enron, it appears, taught us nothing.
But we are not here to serve the system. We selected the system to serve us.
To get here, we ignored the most fundamental principle of systems, economic or otherwise: no system can long survive predatory greed, graft, and corruption on the part of those who manage it. Of course this reality has been understood since the Bronze Age, so what went wrong? Too many members of a mutual admiration society, the politically and economically powerful, concluded that any system that met their needs so admirably had to be near perfect. To perfect it, they concluded, it was necessary only to elbow government out of the picture completely, and to make all forms of government service punishable as unworthy of rational people (i.e., themselves). A political party sold out to the nonsensical proposition that if you give enough money to rich people, they will allow some to fall from their pockets to be scavenged by the needy.
But we are where we are. It was all about money and how I get my share and yours too. Reality requires us now to find a system that works or to lead very different lives than we imagined. As our only viable model, the fundamental tenets of capitalism must be re-worked in ways that account for and control managerial tendencies which many of us deem criminal. Techniques for divorcing politics and Wall Street must be devised. Draconian regulatory and oversight practices must be adopted to curb insatiable greed. To ignore the depravity that led us to the brink is to condemn ourselves to a Sisyphean fate. Capitalism seemed superior to alternate systems because it appeared to do a better job of recognizing man’s basic nature. Let us now dip deep into the well of cynicism to extract the required level of suspicion to cope with man’s base nature.
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