I had a wow moment while respond­ing to someone’s blog post today. The writer described the invis­i­ble hand of cap­i­tal­ism as a bet­ter alter­na­tive to hav­ing count­less flawed humans in pub­lic ser­vice scram­bling to enact their indi­vid­ual views of what’s best for every­one. I inter­preted his opin­ion essen­tially as:

The role of per­fect cap­i­tal­ism is to social­ize human frailty.

If cap­i­tal­ism were exe­cuted per­fectly by per­fect humans, with no lobbyist-driven bar­ri­ers to any­one enter­ing the mar­ket with a new 200 MPG car or a shinier pet rock, the invis­i­ble hand would accom­mo­date people’s will­ing­ness to buy either prod­uct, “flawed” or not. In short, cap­i­tal­ism would ensure that we all bask in the glo­ries and share in the pains of our col­lec­tive human decisions.

Okay I get that, but there are no assur­ances that cap­i­tal­ism will ever be per­fectly exe­cuted. Both pub­lic and pri­vate sys­tems hire from the same pool of flawed human­ity, and we have ample evi­dence of what can hap­pen when greed and fear enter the pic­ture, regardless.

Our “flawed” will­ing­ness to buy into the heav­ily pro­tected oil indus­try has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion where pro­duc­ers can expect the pub­lic to shoul­der their eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ters sim­ply as our share of the cost of doing busi­ness, which under pure cap­i­tal­ism could not be fur­ther from the truth. Under pure cap­i­tal­ism, today there would likely be no more BP.

So to me, the big­ger ques­tion is this:

Is capitalism-as-great-equalizer really how we want to con­duct our human affairs? My love of the human spirit tells me there are much bet­ter ways for us to go than by del­e­gat­ing pure cap­i­tal­ism, if we can ever get there, to Gort-like [1] enforcer status.

Ref­er­ences

1. Klaatu (The Day the Earth Stood Still)

Posted on December 4th, 2011 by Sky
Filed under: Society