Stephen Grossman’s piece, “Capitalism allows Americans to prosper,” lists a number of technologies which benefited humanity or changed society in some way. In most of the piece, Grossman conflates the scientific method and engineering advances with Capitalism itself.
I would probably agree with him that Capitalism has survived this long because greed is an unavoidably innate human characteristic. People were selling things and accumulating money long before accounting, international banking, and commodity trading were invented centuries ago.
In the 21st Century alone we have seen Capitalism in a variety of forms: an American version with varying degrees of greediness; a version under Fascism; a post-war European social-democratic variety; and now Chinese and Russian versions laced with remnants of their old command economies. If Capitalism is more-or-less a natural human activity, the question should not be “whether Capitalism?” It should be “what kind?”
But let’s deal with Grossman’s nonsense. It was cavemen who first discovered fire and the arrow. It was Communists who first sent a cosmonaut into space. Textiles, pottery, bronze, the wheel, the fulcrum, chemistry, navigation, celestial observation, agriculture, and many other sciences and technologies – all these were discovered or developed long before Capitalism became the religion of “Objectivists” like Mr. Grossman. If greed is an innate human characteristic, so is curiosity and laziness – the true mothers of science and technology.
Grossman claims that “the most rational people in any industry, company, or job selfishly pursuing their own happiness, increased everyone’s productivity vastly more than in any society in history.” To the stunted child workers of Fall River inhaling textile fibers, or the coal miners of Kentucky living half a life to profit someone else, this type of “productivity” is not something – to use Grossman’s own language – that a rational person would objectively choose for himself.
Indeed, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries – in which workers were exploited to such a degree – described nicely by Dickens and others – that they were kept in perpetual poverty; or lived “short and brutish” lives precisely because of the nature of piecework or industrial employment; or that the environment was polluted to such an extent – which led to alternate economic theories, revolutions, reforms, regulations, and the compromises we see today.
In contrast to the industrialists of the 18th and 19th century of which Mr. Grossman is enamored, today we know that our natural resources are finite. The capacity of garbage dumps, fuel supplies, water, minerals, even the capacity of the earth to deal with carbon emissions – everything is finite. And yet the main users and abusers of these resources produce products of questionable utility with dangers and expensive disposal costs like there is no tomorrow – and these costs are usually borne by society, not the companies producing them. A good example is our own PCB-contaminated harbor.
For Grossman there does not seem to be any middle ground. “Do you want Stalin… or Steve Jobs?” he asks. Now that we have discovered that many of Steve Jobs’ iPads were produced in Asian sweatshops, simplistic rhetoric like this should be tweaked to ask instead: What kind of Capitalism is acceptable?
This was published in the Standard Times on December 3, 2012
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20121203/opinion/212030324
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