Note: The post below and all the other content dated before 2019 was written for my old website. I am including it here on MoneyElite.blog for posterity.
“Capitalism is a system of winners and losers. From its outset its created poverty alongside wealth.”
I used to tell people I was a communist, mostly because I didn’t like capitalism and gravitated towards some of their socialist ideals, but that was years ago.
Not that I really wanted to be a communist, or agreed with everything they stood for, because that was certainly not the case, but because I just didn’t like our government, our politics, our policies, our culture, our infatuation with constantly consuming everything and anything, and our society’s emphasis on materialism and commercialism.
But then again, who does?
In recent years, I’ve realized its not our country I didn’t like because despite all its flaws, no other nation offers so much opportunity, so much freedom, and so much hope. I love this country, its people, and its essence. I revere our nation’s words at its birth and stand in awe of the lives many sacrificed for its inception and for a people they would never see, for a future they would never fully know, and for a cause they earnestly believed.
I am forever indebted to this country and strive to give back more than its given me, but I fear our nation’s heart has become corrupt.
It’s heart has become steadfast on imposing democracy where it is not present, but more importantly, installing capitalistic governments where not only goods and services will be exchanged for dollars, but also values. Our values.
My quarrel isn’t with democracy, but with Capitalism. Not that it is always bad or evil, because it has done much good, indeed the greatest advances in human civilization have come as a result of our Capitalistic system. Our greatest advancements in health, technology and innovation have admittingly come in pursuit of the all mighty dollar.
Capitalism is a system overwhelmingly driven by the potential of a big financial return. It’s a system driven by self interest. A system driven by greed.
“Greed is, to a large degree, what powers innovation. In that regard it is not evil – greed is, in fact, why we have automobiles, personal computers, stereos, DVD players and plasma TVs.“
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/2008/03/and-now-for-something-completely.html
So greed isn’t bad.
Is it?
Bill Gates said the following on January 25th, 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:
“The great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequalities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement and the most needy get the least, in particular the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. There are roughly a billion people in the world who don’t get enough food, who don’t have clean drinking water, who don’t have electricity, the things that we take for granted. Diseases like malaria that kill over a million people a year, get far less attention than drugs to help with baldness, so the bottom billion misses the benefits of the global economy, and yet they’ll suffer from the negative effects of economic growth they missed out on. Climate change will have the biggest impact on people who’ve done the least to cause it.
Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well market incentives make that happen. In a system of capitalism as peoples wealth rises the financial incentive to serve them rises; as their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls until it becomes zero. We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people, serve poorer people as well.
The genius in capitalism lies in its ability to make self interest serve the wider interest. The potential of a big financial return for innovation unleashes a broad set of talented people in pursuit of many different discoveries. This system driven by self interest is responsible for the incredible innovations that have improved so many lives.”
Don’t tell me the essence, the soul, the spirit of Capitalism isn’t greed or self interest.
Yeah, it has done much good. But at what cost? I would certainly settle for a world with much less innovation and technological advances if it meant much less inequality, but there probably isn’t anything much anyone can do to make our system right, if it is indeed wrong, as I believe it is.
If for whatever reason we cannot fight against injustices, greed, or in this case the evils of Capitalism, let’s not ignorantly champion its cause.
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And greed — you mark my words — will not only save [us], but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
