[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]At heart, capitalism has become a kind of virtual economy in which labour is no longer the sole driving force but merely one node in a network of money-creating schemes. We assign economic values to things – a beautiful vista, for example – regardless of whether they can be anchored to an objective measure like labour. In other words, we obsess about the value of things – an inherently subjective and relative judgment – and neglect cost.
But I’m veering off into abstract territory. The point, which I began to make last week, is this: Capitalism is a strange economic system, both intrinsically and in terms of how it is regulated (or deregulated) by government. (As a side note, even free-market advocates – those people who believe that government should let the market tend to itself – don’t seem to object when the government is used to benefit business, e.g. through subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, tariffs on competitive foreign goods, etc. Again, we can’t escape the role of government in capitalism. In the case of the Bush administration and that big phony deity, Reagan, that role has been distinctly bad. http://www.alternet.org/workplace/74262/) And when we consider the regulation that government has offered in the past two decades, with consequences described by Chalmers Johnson in this article posted at tomdispatch.com (Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, How to Sink America) it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our economy is behaving the way it is. The word “recession” is being bandied about like promises in an electoral campaign, and the government is trying to distract us with money to spend.
While we get a variety of buzzwords like deregulation, supply-side economics, and the like, what we don’t have is a sense of what our economy should look like. Why? Because capitalism has a dirty little secret that no one wants to examine to carefully because to acknowledge it would mean, unquestionably, that we can’t go on with business as usual.
If we consider, in a highly simplistic way, why communism doesn’t work, it’s because of the underlying assumption that would see people produce at maximum capacity and take out of the system only that which they need. The end result is that people try to get the most out of the system and work the least amount possible. Ironically, this is the same problem that works to undermine capitalist economies, in that people want to make the most amount of money and do the least amount of work possible – or make lots of money by having other people do all the work. While this isn’t necessarily bad, in that we can ask, why work harder when you can work smarter, it often is bad because the amount of money people make in relation to the work they do can be vastly out of proportion. Consider the salaries of actors and athletes in big-ticket sports.
Skepticism is Good
The politicians in Washington are borrowing a lot of money in order to, supposedly, give our economy a boost and stave off the dreaded recession. The Bush administration’s deficit-ridden trillion-dollar budget is beyond belief. In light of all the questions we should be asking, we seem to be stuck with the same old economic policies, the same old band-aids. I’m not saying we need to throw capitalism out, nor am I saying that business is bad. Far from it: Business is an important means for us to accomplish our goals. Yet it’s long past time we stop taking the economy for granted and buying into the assumption that capitalism, as it is practiced today, is so far superior to everything else that it’s beyond the reach of skepticism
In the end, it’s about good business and bad business. We already make a distinction, in that almost everyone will agree that someone who cheats a customer by selling a defective product or providing bad service is doing bad business, while honesty is good business. But whether we start with Naomi Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism or consider the shenanigans behind the subprime mortgage crisis, a transformative view of economics is necessary. Money isn’t the only important thing about business, despite what the current political climate tells us. Greed is not good. www.abcnews.go.com (Is Greed Ever Good?) Maybe now’s a good time to reflect on how our economic practices fit in with living, on redefining good business as business that is ethical, based on sensible standards of labour, and not structurally predisposed for the few to stick it to the many.
THE RECREATIONAL NIHILIST | arts, entertainment, culture, politics
the front page online
————————–
web: thefrontpageonline.com
blog: frederik-sisa.blogspot.com
eMail: fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com
