In today's world, you either own property or you are property.
It's an interesting situation that helps the very rich get richer, and the poor stay poor and the middle class pay the taxes.
Communists think that this means capitalism is wrong. Socialists do too, but try to act a little more moderate about it. However, their preferred solution is effectively to destroy it by using the government as some form of benign wealth distribution, and where possible, buying back infrastructure assets. It doesn't work. Indeed, by giving too much power to the State, we effectively become property of the State. It's scary socialists cannot see this, or weight the implications of this appropriately. But that is a different post.
At the other end of the scale are those like the Libertarians, whose core philosophy revolves solely around property and the much vaunted Free Market. The obvious danger in Libertarian philosophy is that it ultimately reduces a person's worth to purely economic terms, and some things cannot be measured in this way. That can be countered, to some degree, by enshrining in law some protection of a person's intangible rights, rights vested in the concept of property and ownership.
In a free market, the traditional benefits of capitalism are all fine and good. Supply and demand regulate price and provide incentive, profit rewards effort and risk, capital funds growth and supports innovation. But is the market actually free?
Ignoring the left wing market interventions for a moment (transnational corporations largely do), we see a market with one primary form of regulation: that of property rights. Except that the full ownership of property has been handed over, without thought, without real understanding, to shareholders. Shareholders were once suppliers of capital, but today, shareholders are merely speculators and wealth extractors.
When you consider the purpose of Corporations and most businesses, they have legal mandate to pursue only one thing: maximizing returns to shareholders.
In a system grounded in the principle of unconscious regulation, corporations will consciously serve one group alone. In a system supposedly geared for rewarding hard work, shareholders are rewarded regardless of their productivity. Shareholder primacy is a form of privilege and entitlement that could be likened to the aristocracy of the past.
I am in favour of capitalism. I see the value of having liquidity of investment, via the stock market. However, the current system isn't really serving the interests of the people at large. The mantra "greed is good" is recognised by the left as instinctively wrong. It is recognised by Christians as leading to sin. Greed is not good.
As usual, it's often not about the problem, it's about the solution. My solutions (when I finally figure them out) is not to rely on the State for salvation. And it's not to support the continuing status quo where ownership is structured as an entitlement and a small class of people can extract wealth to the point of ruining the lives of communities and workers that have participated in the success of the corporation. I have the glimmerings of a solution. It involves keeping the system, but changing the rules. I'll explore this in future posts, especially if this post provokes a reaction that helps my thinking.
So for now, I'll say just one thing:
In today's world, you either own property or you are property.
--ZenTiger
It's an interesting situation that helps the very rich get richer, and the poor stay poor and the middle class pay the taxes.
Communists think that this means capitalism is wrong. Socialists do too, but try to act a little more moderate about it. However, their preferred solution is effectively to destroy it by using the government as some form of benign wealth distribution, and where possible, buying back infrastructure assets. It doesn't work. Indeed, by giving too much power to the State, we effectively become property of the State. It's scary socialists cannot see this, or weight the implications of this appropriately. But that is a different post.
At the other end of the scale are those like the Libertarians, whose core philosophy revolves solely around property and the much vaunted Free Market. The obvious danger in Libertarian philosophy is that it ultimately reduces a person's worth to purely economic terms, and some things cannot be measured in this way. That can be countered, to some degree, by enshrining in law some protection of a person's intangible rights, rights vested in the concept of property and ownership.
In a free market, the traditional benefits of capitalism are all fine and good. Supply and demand regulate price and provide incentive, profit rewards effort and risk, capital funds growth and supports innovation. But is the market actually free?
Ignoring the left wing market interventions for a moment (transnational corporations largely do), we see a market with one primary form of regulation: that of property rights. Except that the full ownership of property has been handed over, without thought, without real understanding, to shareholders. Shareholders were once suppliers of capital, but today, shareholders are merely speculators and wealth extractors.
When you consider the purpose of Corporations and most businesses, they have legal mandate to pursue only one thing: maximizing returns to shareholders.
In a system grounded in the principle of unconscious regulation, corporations will consciously serve one group alone. In a system supposedly geared for rewarding hard work, shareholders are rewarded regardless of their productivity. Shareholder primacy is a form of privilege and entitlement that could be likened to the aristocracy of the past.
I am in favour of capitalism. I see the value of having liquidity of investment, via the stock market. However, the current system isn't really serving the interests of the people at large. The mantra "greed is good" is recognised by the left as instinctively wrong. It is recognised by Christians as leading to sin. Greed is not good.
As usual, it's often not about the problem, it's about the solution. My solutions (when I finally figure them out) is not to rely on the State for salvation. And it's not to support the continuing status quo where ownership is structured as an entitlement and a small class of people can extract wealth to the point of ruining the lives of communities and workers that have participated in the success of the corporation. I have the glimmerings of a solution. It involves keeping the system, but changing the rules. I'll explore this in future posts, especially if this post provokes a reaction that helps my thinking.
So for now, I'll say just one thing:
In today's world, you either own property or you are property.
--ZenTiger