Posted by
Duck Archer on Monday, May 18, 2009 3:54:26 PM
Capitalism, unregulated, has led to Robber Barons and concurrent treatment of workers as merely another cost of production. The point: greed led to dehumanization of fellow men (& women & children also in sweatshops even if not in the mines too). Caveat: is such dehumanization inevitable? Have all cases of relatively unregulated capitalism led to such excesses?
We often hear capitalism works on a recognition of greed’s power.
- Greed can be seen as an inherent evil. Greed has perennially been one of the 7 Deadly Sins (pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth).
- What is greed? Greed is the drive to improve one’s lot in life, taken to extreme. Definition: “an overwhelming desire to acquire or have, as wealth or power, in excess of what one requires or deserves” (Webster’s New Riverside University Dictionary). Therefore, a simple desire to improve one’s lot in life is NOT Greed, any more than eating for health & nourishment, is a desire to be a glutton.
- Effects. Greed, unchecked, led to Robber Barons at least in the USA and in Britain. Some capitalists, like some of any group, will become fanatics. Are robber barons capitalism’s fanatics, or at least one brand thereof? We may not know the answer, but we do know that far from all capitalists become robber barons. Probably, for every robber barron (or, today, 'golden parachute executive), we can find at least one noted philanthropist to match. Philanthropists are but one example of the opposite of a robber baron. But even more basically, greed is not the all-consuming factor in capitalism. Capitalism’s essence, seen in all the is that it allows each person to use natural talents to better his lot in life – and the lot of those he cares about or does honest business with. Just as eating tends to gluttony in many, capitalists often tend to greed of robber barons.
- Caveat. Just to be clear: greed exists not just in capitalism. Greed is not restricted even to all the economic systems; greed is rampant in other aspects of life too, not least being politics. With that broad-effects caveat, we restrict this discussion only to economics, and only to the capitalism system therein.
- Parallel thought. In simple words (that may singe the precision sensitivities of an astrophysicist): a black hole sucks all matter (and light), destroys it in a crush, grows by hanging on to much of it, and re-emits the rest of the matter when it’s been transformed into high-energy radiation. For analogy purposes, the sole two points of interest are (1) the fact of amazingly powerful attractive force and (2) the fact of destroying whatever thing is sucked in. Other strong attractive forces include stars, planets, whirlpools, tornadoes, and magnetic forces, among many others. Each of those attractive forces have other attributes in common, and other unique attributes; for analogy purposes, we still are interested in only the two points hilited in the black hole outline: amazing sucking power, unavoidable destruction of suckee. It seems that, when one has insufficient power to avoid being sucked in, that ‘full ahead at an angle’ allows one to ‘shear’ away after a dangerously close approach.
- Analogy time. Greed is much like an amazingly attractive force. A tool one can use: capitalists can simply avoid the excesses of greed. But there are possibilities still, when one finds himself already far down the path to greed, and greed becomes overwhelmingly powerful. He can make the moral decision to shear away from greed’s sucking force. That decision can be codified into law, just as is codified the morality to not steal or kill in any other ways.
- Limiting Greed In Laws. The decision on where to codify greed laws can be dangerous. Codify too much, and you are nothing besides Socialism. Then greed has a whole new set of dangerous: overly powerful politicians. Political greed is seldom overcome by anything less than bloody revolution that unleashes nearly all the other Deadly Sins too… especially pride, lust, anger, and envy, coupling with greed, and all being a catalyst to the others into the towering conflagration that is most revolutions.
Greed is far from inherent to Capitalism. But one struggles to find socialists, in power, who are not wholly immersed in greed. Inconvenient truth, to those who denigrate capitalism -- regardless whether they also promote socialism.