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Capitalist Suicide Cult
We -- card-carrying members of a suicide cult called "capitalism" -- tell ourselves a fantastical story about the two decades between the late-1980s and the global financial crisis.
That story exalts deregulation, profit maximization and the blind pursuit of material wealth, creature comforts and individual self interest at the expense of everything else, including and especially the well-being of society.
We're paying the ultimate price for that pathological avarice now. Society's dying. The
Thank you much for your always clear eyed, candid commentary.
And thank you for sharing your work with those of us who are nearer to worthless.
Not being a financial wiz I subscribe for the content like this. It’s very much appreciated!
Yeah, by design (and by necessity) the editorial spotlight shifts depending on what’s going on. So, months like this one where you get a market tremor and then some big aftershocks, the majority of the coverage has to go to that. But over the course of any given year, it usually balances out and readers end up getting hundreds of articles on markets, hundreds on macro, hundreds on geopolitics and at least several dozen philosophical/theory-type pieces in-between. If you stick around for a while you’ll always get plenty of whatever it is that you like, whoever you happen to be.
Forty years or so ago, I was waiting to board a delayed flight from Bahrain to Kuwait, I fell into a very nice conversation with the regional rep of an American heavy equipment manufacturer. (I was a junior banker.) When our flight was called, I got up with the folks traveling in first class and he stayed put. His parting comment was along the lines that there’s something wrong with the system when the guys who finance the sale get treated better than the people who make the product. He was spot on.
The above is an argument for balance as much as it is about the evils of what enriches us. I posit that once a crisis has abated we should become socialists in the vein of designing a more sustainable economy. Regulated capitalism has brought us riches beyond measure why give up now and return to pre 1930’s unregulated capitalism?
I can point today at California and New York which by many measures is more economically powerful than most countries as examples of highly regulated economies that have thrived. The task of regulating capitalism is a ongoing effort that must be attended to by an all of society approach. We deserve that businesses are not profiting from the decimation of our quality of life or rapaciously plundering the most vulnerable. We also deserve to have a benign government that holds all life dear and endeavors to enhance the quality of life for all citizens, in short a truly sustainable government. To have less of a government is to suffer needlessly, and risks an unsustainable government. We also deserve an environment where we can become wealthy if we want and define wealthy on our own terms if we want.
However you are correct in comparison that many people are committing suicide on their own well being by engaging in a cult of Capitalism. Happiness does not have to be pursued, it is all around us for the taking. Especially so in such a rich country as ourselves. However there are those who wish us to pray at the alter of suffering through pursuing a false prophet. In the vein of your article the false prophet is measured by bank accounts not by what we give back. In that measure your writings have the potential give back much more than the effort you evidently put into it, for you are one life affecting the lives of many. I may never give as much back or I might exceed your giving back, but that measure does not make the man. That a person tries to give back is truly the mark of a well lived life.
Deregulation and free trade can be good for all, but if and only if a society has a robust safety net and a budget for social goods to spread around the gains. Absent that, you have social darwinism, and a winner take all dystopia. Part of the social goods budget needs to provide development funds for struggling regions/cities/rural areas and historicallyvdisadvantaged groups.
Regulation was needed in many cases over ther years because of our capitalist structure. I always cite the memory of travelling up into nothern Maine when I was a kid. When we drove through the towns with one or more paper mills the stench of something like acetic acid along with yellow waters and white foam still linger in my memory bank.
But, there was NO WAY that any mill owner back then could make an individual effort to raise costs introducing less polluting production equipment. That would be commericail and career suicide. It took EVIL regulation to “coax” paper producers to switch over in mass. .