The Capitalist System won, there is no doubt about it. The real Communists never had a chance and the dictatorships that ruled covered in its fig-leaf are mostly gone. That debate has been indefinitely postponed if not cancelled. The debate now is within the system to decide how unfettered it should be.
Markets can indeed create miracles. I do have a deep faith in fair and free markets, as do in free and fair elections. The thing about markets it that they work with monetary values.
Vital parts of the equation for a happy and healthy life have zero monetary value.
Imagine that you are a prospector in a sinleship on the gold-rush (well, helium-3-rush), in the Asteroid Belt. You will have to pay for everything you need to stay alive: air, water, radiation shelter, shelter (heat, pressure) etc. If you don’t buy that refill for you oxygen tank, you die. If you muck up the water recycling, you die. If you jettison radiation shielding to save on weight, you die in the next solar flare. If you can’t keep your ship’s insides within a few tens of degrees of normal because you didn’t replace the faulty thermostat, you freeze or fry.
Perhaps the cliche is old enough to have regained effect. The Earth is but a larger version of that spaceship. It provides services that appear to be free. There is no such thing as a free lunch.. The true costs of these services are becoming clear as these giant life-support systems begin to malfunction.
Even without the world-transforming change in viewpoints that would assign its proper valuation of many trillions of dollars to the planet’s ability to keep us alive and growing, we can begin the work of estimating.
Some things will be forever incapable of being priced, which is as it should be. On the other hand though, how much does the polluted air in LA and Athens and Mexico City, etc, cost in increased health care costs and unnecessary deaths? If one were to insure Bangladesh against submersion, what valuation would an insurance company give you? Ditto for Florida. What will be the cost of the cancers. etc, from the ozone hole? On a more pedestrian level, how much extra coal will we have to burn to keep our ACs in step with global warming? And how much will that contribute to global climate change?
If they want to force us to count beans, we shall. Even by their rules, we win.
And when we win, we come a step closer to changing the rules.
Unfortunately, the only other thing that will bring us closer to changing the rules will be even more widespread and bigger disasters.
The plight of the orange roughie (a particularly delicious fish which was apparently its great downfall) is another illustration of the tragedy of the commons. It is a slow maturing fish, typically needing something like a century before reaching sexual maturity, from the southern Pacific. Unfortunately for it, orange roughie became fashionable and has been hunted to commercial extinction and potentially even actual extinction. As stocks declined and the price went up, the fishermen became ever more determined to catch the fish.
What should the last orange roughie dinner cost?
What is the monetary value of a sunset? Of a stolen kiss? Of the last of a species?
What is the monetary value of the air you breathe? That last breath you take?
PS. You know my time-zone. I’ll be back later.
The idea of capitalism is that workers will work harder and smarter to produce more profit for management on the incentive of receiving a monetary benefit for so doing, thus enabling the worker to amass – gasp! – capital.
Armed with his capital, the worker can choose any number of options. He can start up his own little business producing the same product as his former employer, thus providing that employer with both competition and an incentive of the employer’s own – to produce a better product!
Our worker may choose instead to use his capital to send one or more of his children to school, thus enabling them to secure a better-paying job and mobilize upward.
Or he may purchase a home, or if he already has one, a second one, to rent out, thus amassing even more capital. And so on.
This only works, though, as long as the free market values the workers labor at minimum, equal to the free market price of the worker’s survival. Actually more than survival, otherwise, no capital.
Once the value of your labor falls below the price of your survival, you are no longer operating in a capitalist system. You have no incentive to produce more profit for management, and management has no incentive to allow you to live. When you are priced out of housing, or rendered unusable due to income insufficient to purchase medical treatment, there are dozens at the door waiting to take your place.
No longer are any of you working with the hope of amassing capital, getting ahead, achieving upward mobility or any of those bright capitalist dreams.
You are merely serving your lord, at whose pleasure you may possibly be rewarded by being accorded the privilege of doing so another day.
Feudalism won.
I would say that in electing Feudalism – though I don’t think the transition is 100% yet – we have achieved the perfection of democratic Capitalism. It can go no higher. Well, I’m slowly coming to that conclusion. It all has to do with the brilliant plan of getting rid of education – then you have created a block of sheep with the right to vote (bit like giving a child a gun).
The US empire isn’t a capitalist system and the Soviet empire wasn’t a communist system and in what sense did the US system “win”?
If you are going to compare the two systems you need to look at the entire US imperium, not just how it provided for the richest 5 or 10%. Look at the average status of all the people in the imperial colonies – which include some of the poorest and most war torn countries in the world – and compare with the Soviet colonies – which aren’t doing great but are doing a damn sight better. Hell some of those former soviet satelites have health care as good as Americans have (on average).
Look at how Afghanistan is doing and tell me the US imperial economic system has “won”. It’s doing worse than North Korea (the poorest former soviet ally?)
The US system is a slave system. It grabs the wealth of most of its people and concentrates them into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Naturally such a system looks good if you only look at the top 10% or the top 1%. But the usual test is to look at the bottom of the heap and here we see that the US imperium is poorer than the former Soviet imperium.
we destroy. Yet, don’t you find it odd that if the edible item is a land animal (avian or mamalian) and we preferentially eat it, that species is among the most prolific on earth? Think chickens and cows.
But fish? Other that catfish and trout, you’re doomed. Shrimp are getting a respite in the wild because they’re being increasingly farmed in S. Am.
Anybody know how marine culture of the piscines is doing?