Capitalism, capitalism, capitalism

It's delightful, it's delicious, it's delovely...

Well, not totally so.

The good parts:

People like to be able to do what they want. They also like to be able to accumulate stuff to take care of themselves and their families. Capitalism provides a maximum of opportunity to do these things, for those who are ambitious, hardworking, and able.

Capitalism is an amazing engine for generating economic prosperity. The market mechanism is very efficient at providing rewards to people who are able to see and provide something that people want; and ruthless about winnowing out products and producers that people don't want.  We all get to vote on what should be produced....with our dollars.

The bad parts:
There are three.

 First is the fact that unfettered, completely free capitalism, treats workers like...well, like raw materials.  A corporation wants its labor to be as cheap as possible. This is not entirely (or even mainly) because the executives are greedy, nasty people: most of them are not. But where competition exists, they are not going to be able to pay their workers much more than their competitors do, because then their competitors will be able to sell their goods for lower prices, and, other things (like quality) being equal, which are the consumers going to buy? To see that this is so (corporations paying people as little as possible), think of the 19th century and early 20th century.  People worked 6 days a week, ten or more hours a day, for wages so low that families had to have father, mother, and children working to be able to eat. This is still true in some places in the world....for instance Pakistan, where many children work 10 hour days making athletic shoes and soccer balls and carpets.


Second is caring for the environment. Until the last thirty years or so, corporations took no notice whatsoever of the environmental effects of what they were doing. Pollution of the air, water, and soil, were the result, along with the current big topic of global warming. 


Third is the absolutely corrosive effect of advertising on our individual and collective lives. It is very apparently part of human nature to be interested in stuff, especially new stuff that other people have, and to want to get it ourselves.  Modern marketing and advertising professionals are fiendishly clever at manipulating those natural desires, and this creates the consumption-focused society that we in the developed nations, and especially in the United States, live in--and most of the developing world aspires to.