There is a school of thought that capitalism is immoral and that the wealthy are necessarily evil. That school was in session yesterday when Rupert Murdoch was "assaulted" with shaving cream while testifying about how some people who worked for him may have paid to have some phones hacked into.
While hypocrisy is not the focus of this post, it's hard to ignore; there is simply so much of it. And yes, that includes a "captain of industry" suddenly saying, "No, I can't take responsibility for every little thing my company does. I'm just one man," or words to that effect. But it also includes the rest of the media, whose lust for truth knows no bounds, until they don't like the truth, then suddenly the bounds are like an old friend.
And worst of all of course is the government--British, American, whatever--who say they're shocked, simply shocked, that anyone could stoop so low as to hack into a cell phone. This in a day and age when western governments make it their business to eliminate all privacy as a threat to the public good. Interestingly, there seems to be a different bent to things in the EU, where the habit seems to be to trust the government and not corporations, with the theory being that governments answer to the people and corporations are private. In the states, traditionally anyway, I think the feeling has been just the opposite, with the theory being that corporations answer to our wallets and government is unaccountable.
So Rupert Murdoch is called a "greedy billionaire". And the guy with the shaving cream must have really been a principled fellow, to take that brave stand. I'm sure a bunch of guys passed a joint around all night while rewatching the footage, grumbling about the man keeping them down. This is what is known as not a meaningful protest. It changes nothing, convinces no one of anything, serving only to help some misfit climb up the ladder in his revolutionary circle or get some street cred with the cute Marxist who won't give him the time of day.
Churchill said it, "If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. If you're still a liberal at forty, you have no head." But, sadly, 30 is the new twenty.
There is a moral argument for socialism, or, rather, against capitalism. It is rare indeed to hear it genuinely made--that is, argued by someone who has any credibility to argue it. That's not to say I believe it, in any event. Regardless, I'm not going to refute it on any moral grounds for now, since, whether it's "right" or not, it just doesn't work. And it doesn't work because, I believe, at a cellular level, it is contrary to the nature of man. Actually, that's too narrow. I believe it is contrary to the nature of living things.
We are fooled so easily into thinking ourselves so far advanced above the beasts of the fields (and the plants, please, they're so slow). But time and again we learn otherwise. Of course, we laud nature excessively too, imagining that the balance we lack is somehow commonplace in the wild. But life on the plain or in the woods, amongst tundra or tall trees, is often violent, sickly, and short. And extinctions occurred before we came along. We are not the solution, we are part of the problem, assuming you view it as a problem. I view it as a fact of life. Natural selection.
Understand, when we talk about natural selection, we're not talking about a conscious process; we're talking about systems that only work one way. If an organism survives to reproduce, it wins, for another generation. It can do this in any number of ways. The organisms that find a good way, flourish. The ones that do not, will flounder and die. We are programmed to want to be the best, not by society, and not by commercials. It's part of our basic instruction set, like the boot code on your pc.If you think it's easily overridden, drop by a great site called YOU ARE NOT SO SMART and check out any article. The latest, on misattributed arousal should correct that whole "we are smarter than the average bear" thing.
Those who oppose capitalism seem to forget how long it's been around. They also seem to forget that other things have been tried before and failed, miserably. Not just in the 20th century, but long before. Those who practice it, are not given the opportunity to practice it for long. Like religions that don't allow sex, they die out in a generation--indeed, faster, the more successful they are.
There is some consolation, then, at least for curmudgeonly libertarians like me. The kind of liberalism we are flirting with will die out quickly enough. Socialism itself will ultimately do away with the socialists. Because behaving contrary to human nature is bone crushing. It eliminates innovation with desire to escape. In place of genius, there is dissidence. Instead of community, there is contraband. And finally, in place of productivity, there is revolution. That's what happened in the Soviet Union, the more quickly because of their extremes,and the more messily too, with oligarchs who mysteriously managed to emerge from the equanimity of communism with more than a few dollars in their pockets (some animals, after all, are more equal than others). And in China too, though much work remains. There is much freedom to come there, and it will be bought and paid for by capitalists.
Another disreputable revolutionary, John Adams, said something like "We study war so that our children may study commerce, navigation, and industry. They study such enterprises so that their children may study art." In any system which presumes to govern fairness, there will always be loopholes. And we will always find them. Not to do so would arguably be irresponsible to ourselves and our loved ones, especially when you believe the system is rigged.
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