Capitalism - Problems and Praise

I think that anyone who thinks that unfettered capitalism is a good thing has a very short memory and/or knowledge of history.

NO unfettered financial system works. We saw Russia fall to unfettered communism fifteen years ago, and now we're seeing America fall to unfettered capitalism.

You see, up until about 1980, capitalism was good for both American business and the American people. It worked well. The American dream was alive and well, people could make a living, even if one of them decided to be a house-spouse, and people got rich. Of course, at the time, “millionaire” was still something to brag about.

And yes... we had regulation.

Up until the first twenty years of this century, we tried our first experiment with unfettered capitalism, and it failed miserably for everyone but a few. We had child labor, sweatshops and unsafe working conditions. A few people got very, very rich and everyone else was plunged into a depression.

Over the years between the twenties and the mid seventies, we started seeing the government regulate business. Child labor laws, health and safety regulations, reasonable working hours and overtime laws. Under President Nixon, we saw anti-pollution laws enacted to protect the environment from corporate robber-barons. Under Ford and Carter, we saw a slew of anti-monopoly laws that broke up, among many others, A T & T, who we called “ma bell”. It was the only phone service available, so they could basically charge anything that they wanted.

For the men that valued money above all else, these was apparently the last straws.

Some believe that the election of Ronald Reagan was engineered by big business. I won't say one way or the other, because I don't know. But I will say that big business profited from the Reagan years while almost no one else did. They started overturning the anti-monopoly laws and the environmental laws. Because Joe Lunchbox had little real knowledge of these things, and couldn't see an immediate effect on THEM, there was no uproar. When they tried to change the labor laws that DID effect these people directly, there WAS an uproar, and the labor laws were barely scratched. So instead, behind our backs, laws were passed that made it profitable for companies to outsource jobs more than they ever had before.

Since then, we have seen one corporate-sponsored president after another trample our economy like Godzilla did Tokyo. In less than thirty years, we watched the results of this capitalism Godzilla completely destroy everything that we had built over the previous fifty.

Don't get me wrong on any of this. I'm not a communist and don't have more than a little leaning toward socialism. Again, just like capitalism, it really only works if it is tightly regulated and allows people to make money.

I like money. I have two books that I'm shopping around to agents right now and I hope that they sell and sell well, so that I can quit my day job and still live comfortably. Part of what I want to do with that money is buy apartment complexes and start some manufacturing businesses that will employ Americans fairly, so that they have THEIR shot at resurrecting the American dream. And yes, I will want a fair profit from these.

But that's part of the problem in modern-day America... a fair profit is no longer enough. Millionaire or even billionaires are no longer considered REALLY rich... we now heap our praise only on trillionaires. We oooh and aah over someone with a solid gold toilet or a ski-slope in their Arizona home, while many of us struggle to make it from week to week. We consider a politician with ten homes and God only knows how many cars a “regular joe” while we deride a college teacher and community organizer who made his first million two years before he was elected president as a snobbish elitist. And these mega-rich people have no compunction about putting a couple of million dollars into political campaigns to convince us that it's bad for America if we do anything that might reduce their annual income from eight billion dollars a year to (God forbid) five or even four billion. We're still struggling with health care reform which largely benefits the poor in our society. We're now, for some insane reason, debating whether or not we should extend Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, or allow them to go back to a maximum cap of 39%. (For the record... during the period that many conservatives consider our “golden era”, the 1950's, the maximum tax rate was 91%.)

Brothers and sisters, we have to stop this. Stop buying items that are made in China unless it's something that you really need. Learn to live with less, unless you're willing to spend more to get these luxuries made in America and supporting our economy. This Christmas, for instance, live with the Christmas decorations that you have or buy only American-made decorations. You can find some every year at madeinusaforever.com.

After all, what would Jesus do? (He IS the reason for the season, remember.) I kind of think that I know what he WOULDN'T. He wouldn't support the mass enslavement of a culture in order to fulfill our own fetish for the gaudy.

Peace.

D69