The great merit of the capitalist system, it has been said, is that it succeeds in using the nastiest motives of nasty people for the ultimate benefit of society.
E. A. G. Robinson via QI
In 2008, the greed of corporate bankers blinded them to the actual risks they were engaging in with derivatives, risks that they will be engaging in again now that Donald Trump (OHM) has pulled the teeth out of legislation keeping them from doing what they did before. They will shortly be wrecking the economy with their pursuit of the next billion dollars that they can’t spend but want anyway.
It isn’t capitalism or socialism that is committing these misdeeds, it is human nature. We will continue to fail to properly regulate industries so long as we fail to understand human nature. Continuing to argue about socialism vs. capitalism is to miss the proverbial forest for the trees. The vast majority of humanity is poorly served by the current economic systems of the world, and it will take an action by those unwashed masses to right the situation unless the wealthy figure out how to save their own necks first.
Take the image above as an illustration of the problem here. Socialism isn’t keeping everyone equally poor, and it certainly wasn’t socialism causing the bread lines in the 1930’s. The Great Depression was caused by the failure of the gold standard to live up to the dreams of the people who created it. America, with huge reserves of gold, had no money for the poor to buy things with. The rest of the world was in depression because of the austerity that was required by the gold standard to bolster the other nation’s reserves of gold, reserves the US government would not let go of because it had no mechanism with which to distribute its wealth of gold to the American people to buy goods and services with. There was no mechanism to get funds into the hands of people who needed them until Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked on his dream of federal assistance. A dream that the gold bugs of the time thought was foolhardy. Capitalism caused the failure of the world markets in 1929, because capitalism doesn’t have a means for controlling the greed of participants in the system.
Suggested reading: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
It was socialism that ended the depression, not created it. It was capitalism’s ideologues, people who still support the gold standard today, who had no idea how to get money out among the people without them having to work for it. People who were in the meantime starving to death while crops rotted in the field. All of them wanting work and there was no money to pay them to do the work that needed doing.
All ideologues fail. They fail reliably and consistently because they cannot conceive of something outside their ideology. That is the nature of what it is to adhere to an ideology in the first place. The nature of belief in an ideal. You cannot improve on perfection, if you accept that what you believe in is perfection.
My family and I have been personally saved by socialism. When I say socialism, I mean the Social Security system set up by congress under FDR. My disability payments have kept us fed and housed for the last decade and more, and those payments have been the only thing coming in for the last few years. Now that president Trump has made it safe to discriminate against everyone who isn’t a straight, white, perfectly abled evangelical American male, there aren’t too many jobs out there for those of us who don’t fit the bill, even if we aren’t disabled.
Make no mistake here, this is by design. The way to make sure that the poor whites who voted for Trump have jobs is to take them from the other people who currently have them. Brown people. Women. Gays. This is what the phrase zero-sum game means, and Donald Trump believes wholeheartedly in the zero-sum game. There is only one pie, and any slice someone else gets is one less slice for him. His Stormtrumpers agree with him, which is why they are willing to do violence to people who speak against his policies.
Social programs are socialism. They are one of the facets of socialism that have been adopted widely; and they’ve been adopted widely because if you live like a king on wealth that you haven’t been seen working for, the people who do work all day resent that you live better than they do. When you get to eat while they starve. When you get a dry place to sleep while they huddle in misery exposed to the elements. Now, you can say that is a benefit taken from the wealthy at great expense, but if these benefits were not provided to the poor, the wealthy wouldn’t live long. There are quite a few more poor people in the world than wealthy people, and the poverty level is rising to the point where it gets pretty hard to find a family in which someone isn’t suffering from a lack of funds.
When your relatives start dying in the street for no good reason, you start to ask uncomfortable questions of the people who are supposed to run this country. That is what put Donald Trump into power in the first place, poor rural whites with friends and family addicted to opioids sold to them by profit-seeking companies that have so far walked away from their malfeasance scot-free. There will be a price to be paid for this malfeasance, and you can either be on the receiving end of the punishment now, or not. If not, you better get to helping make life livable for the people who are suffering right now.
This is where the Press fails in its duty to the Republic more than anywhere else: When Cheney says “Democratic colleagues who would like to impose socialism” she should be immediately stopped and required to define the terms and name the names.
This is where the Citizen fails in their duty to liberty, when they allow any politician to say these things without question, without challenge, without accountability.
Stonekettle Station
