Let’s begin with where we agree. Regardless of your ideology, we would both like to maximize freedom for as many people as possible. Because we are both empathetic and compassionate people, we would like to minimize suffering for as many people as possible. So, where is the conflict?
The debate is over the best way to do this. Some people believe Capitalism is the best system because it ensures innovation, competition and allows everyone to participate. It’s infinitely superior to the Feudalism it replaced. Others recognize the value of Capitalism, but also see what has become of it. It has its own shortcomings, too. It’s transformed the American government, as well as those of several other democracies, into oligarchies where a few wealthy people have nearly complete control of the economy. They have the jobs and the tools needed to do the work, and they make all the decisions without input from those who are doing the work. Is there an alternative to this? Shockingly enough, I think there is. Let’s explore some other ideas.
Since we first began living in tribes for survival, we have needed a practical means of trading with one another. You need my chickens. I need your corn. We can try to find some fair way of working out how many ears of corn equal a chicken, but this becomes impractical quickly. So… we invented money. A chicken costs between $3.00 and $30.00. An ear of corn goes for around $1.00. This worked well for a while. But, soon enough, we began owning land, and that changed everything. Suddenly, we had lords who were landowners. The name persists today. You pay rent to your landlord.
Feudalism was the idea that most of us would work the land for the lords in exchange for a small portion of the value our labor yielded. Nobles owned the land, and there was little freedom for anyone who was not a Noble. This gave maximal freedom to lords and minimal freedom to the rest of the people.
Capitalism changed that. Merchants began to gain autonomy from the lords. This required enormous social change, including violence. Capitalism increased freedom for many more people. Well done, Capitalism!
Under Capitalism, in its current incarnation, the boss has the most freedom. The boss decides on the money you earn. You produce something. They sell it to someone else. How much that is worth is determined by how disposable you are. The more people who want your job, the less that job is worth. If I’ll do it for less money than you will, you’re out of a job. If someone will do it for less than I will, I’m out of the job I took from you. It’s not a question of how well we do it, but how cheaply it can be done. The less spent on wages, the more is reaped in profit. Slavery did this beautifully. It was a one-time investment; plus whatever money was required to keep the human alive and strong enough to perform the work. The labor was free. The existence of slavery is, however, abhorrent to nearly anyone living in the 21st Century.
Under Feudalism, you worked for the Lords. Under Capitalism, you work for the boss. In either case, you work for someone else, and increase their wealth, or you risk homelessness and hunger. Anthony Tagonist used to tell me I’m being melodramatic when I talk about people starving. It turns out, I’m not.
In 2018 six million children experience(d) food insecurity.[35] (The organization) Feeding America estimates that around one in seven children or approximately 11 million, children experience hunger and do not know where they will get their next meal or when.[36] The wide breadth between these sources’ data could possibly explain that food insecurity is not all-encompassing of hunger, and is only a solid predictor. 13.9% of households with children experience food insecurity with the number increasing for households having children under the age of six (14.3%).[36]
While it’s true that few people starve to death in America, this doesn’t excuse hunger. It’s an exceptionally unpleasant state. And it’s completely avoidable. We throw away enough food to end hunger.
USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) estimates that about 30 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten at the retail and consumer level.
We have enough to feed ourselves. Capitalism makes it undesirable to do so because there isn’t enough profit in it.
We have enough housing for everyone. There are many more empty homes than there are homeless people.
The White House reports that as of 2019, over half a million Americans don’t have a home to sleep in on any given night, while almost 17 million potential homes were standing empty. If the overall numbers of homeless citizens weren’t shocking enough, between 2017 and 2019, there was an increase of over 34,000 unsheltered homeless people nationally – even before a global pandemic and expected recession.
All this, while the number of empty properties around the country has increased by over 1.1 million since 2010, leaving over 12% of all housing units in the US vacant as of the latest figures in 2018.
https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/
We can’t provide everyone with shelter because it’s insufficiently profitable. In America, there are few places you’re allowed even to sleep without some sort of authorization. Sleeping in the woods, if you get caught, can get you arrested if you haven’t gotten some sort of permit.
There is more freedom under Capitalism than under Feudalism. It is still, however, not a shared freedom. It does very well for those at the top, but the majority of the pyramid, at the bottom, still have to struggle just for survival. There are more ways to ascend the pyramid under Capitalism, but these opportunities are not equally available to all people, and, even under the most favorable of circumstances, still require an element of luck.
In my Father’s generation, one person could earn enough under Capitalism to support a family in a decent home. That is becoming increasingly difficult all the time. Capitalists own the jobs. They also own the homes. They are buying them as cheaply as possible, and then they are renting them out at higher rates than ever before, or they are waiting until they can sell them at the greatest profit. That’s what Capitalism does. Homes are not seen as places to live. They are seen as commodities to be bought and sold for profit.
“One of the reasons housing prices have gotten so out of control, is that corporate America sensed an opportunity,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) last week at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, a panel he chairs.
Brown took direct aim at private equity firms and corporate landlords in particular.
“They bought up properties, they raised rents, they cut services, they priced out family home buyers, and they forced renters out of their homes,” he said. (This happened to my roommates and me a few years ago.)
Investors have been snapping up homes in and around downtown Cleveland at a staggering rate, putting three of the city’s Zip codes among the top 15 nationally in the rate of investor purchases last year.
Sally Accorti Martin, the former longtime housing director for South Euclid, a small city east of Cleveland, testified at the hearing that a majority of the city’s roughly 1,600 rental units are now owned by companies from other states, and that tenants have suffered as a result.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/housing-market-investors/
So now, the wealthy control both the money we make and how much of it we pay simply to stay alive.
Capitalism is superior to Feudalism, but it still doesn’t provide much freedom for many people.
Is there an alternative?
Before we go any further, it’s important that we have a definition of Socialism. It’s a scare word that few of us understand. With that in mind, I’m going with the definition from The Oxford Dictionary.
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
If I suggest we consider Socialism, you’re going to point to the countries that have tried it and would appear to have failed catastrophically. Ha-Joon Chang tells us in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism:
It is not true that almost all rich countries have become rich through free market policies. The truth is more or less the opposite.
All of today’s rich countries, including Britain and the U.S., have become rich through the combination of protectionism, subsidies and other policies that today they advise the developing countries not to adopt.
We’re taught that Socialism is when we give the government control of everything. We don’t like much of what the government does. Few of us trust the government. Consequently, the idea of handing over everything to the government sounds dystopian.
I agree. I’m less than pleased with the efforts to make the American government into an authoritarian dictatorship. If I tell you that we’re going to give the government more control, you will think of the things you hate about the government. In my case, it’s trying to deal with any programs: Unemployment, Disability, Food Stamps, and the DMV are all horrible. It is also the obvious and blatant corruption seen in nearly all of politics. I promise I’m on your side with disliking much of the government.
When we think of Socialism, we think of economic catastrophes, and we decide that Capitalism is better in comparison. The problem is that we can’t really do any sort of scientific breakdown of this. Every country starts in a different place, and comparing one to another really doesn’t work. Socialist experiments are usually begun in countries where Capitalism is already causing massive economic suffering. The countries were weak when they started trying to reform them. To expect miraculous overnight success is unreasonable.
Salvador Allende tried a Socialist experiment in Chile in the 1970s. What were the results?
During its first year in office, the Allende Government achieved economic growth, reductions in inflation and unemployment, a redistribution of income, and an increase in consumption[citation needed]. The government also significantly increased salaries and wages, reduced taxes, and introduced free distribution of some items of prime necessity[citation needed]. Groups which had previously been excluded from the state labor insurance scheme (mainly the self-employed and small businessmen) were included for the first time, while pensions were increased for widows, invalids, orphans, and the elderly[citation needed]. The National Milk Plan affected 50% of Chilean children in 1970, providing 3,470,000 with half a litre of milk daily, free of charge.[8][9][text–source integrity?]
Then why did he fail? There are many reasons, but one of them is certainly that The United States did all it could to ensure Socialism would fail.
The U.S. administration of U.S. PresidentRichard Nixon, then embroiled in the Vietnam War and Cold War with the Soviet Union, was openly hostile to the possibility of a second socialist regime (after Cuba) in the Western Hemisphere. There was clandestine support by the U.S. government to prevent Allende from taking office after election: On 16 October 1970, a formal instruction was issued to the CIA base in Chile, saying in part, “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden”.[29]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Salvador_Allende#:~:text=The%20U.S,hidden%22.%5B29%5D
It’s easy to see why The United States would like Socialism to fail. If it is shown to work elsewhere, a case could be made that it might work here. If we tried it in America, it would not be ideal for those with the most. It would mean redistributing the power in this country. If the people have a voice in the decisions to be made about how to run a company, those with the most money may well have a little less. The people are likely to want more for themselves and less for the bosses.
The argument against Socialism is that there have been so many failures when it was tried. This is true. Socialism fails frequently. On the other hand, a slightly altered version of it, called Democratic Socialism, tends to work well. We have seen evidence of this in several countries.
Some argue that there has been no completely socialist country that has been successful, only countries that have seen success in adopting socialist policies.
Bolivia is an example of a prosperous socialist country. Bolivia has drastically cut extreme poverty and has the highest GDP growth rate in South America.
Other countries that have adopted and enacted socialist ideas and policies to various degrees, and have seen success in improving their societies by doing so, are Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democratic-socialist-countries
Is Socialism the only way to improve things? I doubt it. In fact, Socialism already exists in America, and we enjoy it. Your military, your police and fire departments, your trash collection, your paved roads, and your schools are all examples of Socialism. The most obvious example is Social Security. It says, among other things, that your value to the world doesn’t end when you become too old to work anymore.
Heather Cox Richardson told us something about the beginnings of Social Security.
The Social Security Act is known for its payments to older Americans, but it did far more than that. It established unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.
- Her nightly newsletter, 8/13/2022
It was the idea that rugged individualism doesn’t have to be the only way to be an American. It realized that we do better working together to help one another than we do with the attitude that “I got mine; you get yours.”
Socialism, for me, is best described in one of my favorite quotes from Captain Picard, in Star Trek: First Contact. “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
For me, the most important question isn’t one of ideology. The question must always be: how can we do better? Capitalism is better than Feudalism. Something else, perhaps some form of Socialism, is going to improve on Capitalism. And then, we will work to do better than that.
That’s the way of the world
Plant your flower and you grow a pearl
–Charles Stepney / Maurice White / Verdine White
Fred's Thoughts 