@markkzuccerberg and everyone else who blindly follows capitalism. Let’s have a little chit chat about small government.
When I said small government was bad and cited Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman I was citing two of the most influential members of the modern conservative party. Milton Friedman’s philosophies Barry Goldwater which was basically the first Trump (the only reason he didn’t win the nomination was because the parties were not quite as democratic in the 70s). Now let’s take these concepts out of the historical context which reveals them to be blatantly anti progress and social justice and examine them as ideas.
The modern conservative (let’s say libertarian as Rand was pro-union and pro-abortion and Friedman called himself a neo-liberal) believes that small-government is best because when government gets involved it messes things up. Rand would often say something about how it was wrong to force the majority onto the individual (I actually have a lot of complicated feelings for Ayn because her books really did influence me a lot as a writer). What this concept fails to understand is that without regulation there cannot be true competition.
There’s a good documentary on netflix that explains this called Saving capitalism but I’ll give a brief summary of what I’m talking about. Right now we live in a world where a company cannot outright lie to you, and has to disclose any issues that might arise with their product. But without regulation you’d have companies constantly cutting corners and not telling you about it. “Well we could research our products” someone might argue. The thing is that without government agencies actually doing the research there wouldn’t really be any reliable information to go off of. What we’d have instead would be very similar to the Gilded Age when people were constantly sold faulty products with no accountability.
I remember when I first read Atlas Shrugged Dagny (the main character) decides to build a transcontinental railroad after her brother and CEO kicked the only competing company out of Colorado. She decides to make it out of this special medal created by her friend and future lover Hank Rearden. People are concerned about the metal which is untested and Dagny says something along the lines of “If you don’t think it’s safe don’t ride our trains.” Even back when I loved those books that bothered the shit out of me. People didn’t have a choice, the Taggart company had kicked out the competition! Of course people were upset!
Too often a similar situation happens with corporations in our world. Companies like Walmart will use underhanded means of keeping prices low. If you make $11 an hour you can’t be the ethical consumer you want to be (I’ve literally been there). You may be saying “well why were you only making $11 an hour why couldn’t you find a better job there must be something wrong with YOU” actually no, I was getting my degree and literally all the jobs open to me without a degree offered me less than $15/hr and I was looking for a job in child care specifically. I couldn’t find a single place that would hire me and pay more than $12/hr. For watching children. Do you want the person caring for, educating, feeding, and entertaining your child to be paid $12/hr (especially considering tuition at that daycare was $330 a week)? Regardless of your answer, I had no choice but to take a job that did not value the amount of work I was doing. Literally every job in the area was going to pay at the same rate.
And here’s where I quote Karl Marx who (contrary to popular belief) was not some radical revolutionary but rather an economist who was merely reporting back based on his expertise. This quote is from Wage Labor and Capital.
But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man – i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.
Marx, Karl. Wage Labour and Capital (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 312-315). LeoPard Books India. Kindle Edition.
Capitalism was seen as a tool of feudal liberation. No longer did individuals belong to a noble lord. The reality was that nothing really had changed. True it is rare these days that someone can say “I belong to that person who lives in the nice house on the hill.” But the entire lower class does belong to the entire upper class. We may be able to choose who to work for but we can’t choose not to work.
What does this really mean? It means that people with severe physical or mental disabilities will often live in poverty because they cannot work and cannot support themselves. It means that a woman who is being abused will stay with her abuser because she will be homeless otherwise. It means a child may stay in an abusive household because they will be homeless otherwise. It means people forgo taking their medicine because it has side effects that keep them from being able to work. It means people being stuck with medical bills because they took a job that gave them cancer because they had no other options. It means your kid getting the flu because my coworker couldn’t afford not to come into work.
But the government does other things too. We think of capitalism as a merit-based system but how can it be that way if the government does not even the playing field? Things like copyright (which, to be fair, Ayn Rand did believe was the job of the government), and intellectual property laws keep people like writers, musicians, artists, etc in business. Regulations on every industry not only protect the consumer but protects people who do try to run ethical businesses and keep shoddy work from being passed off as the real deal (there’s a great episode of Rotten on Netflix about Chinese companies importing some sort of food product that was sub-par and hurting the industry in America) Without government assistance we wouldn’t have things like Railroads which were subsidized by the government. In the great depression agriculture was subsidized by the government in order to preserve the infrastructure (both physical and non-physical) that would develop into our current ability to produce food at an amazing rate.
I am not saying capitalism is evil. It has given us a lot of great stuff, but it never existed in a laissez faire world. Small government is great when it means the King doesn’t have the right to take your pee for gunpowder (yes this did happen). But it’s not so great when it means Walmart can pay people so little that the town it’s in goes bankrupt because of all the assistance its employees needed. We need to balance government with capitalism. That doesn’t mean seizing the means of production, it means taxing the DeVoss family so we can all have the right to life (aka universal or single payer health insurance).
I get that this was long and I didn’t cover everything I wanted to, but I urge you to read Wage Labor and Capital by Karl Marx, Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, and The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Another great one is The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist is another great one about Slavery and Capitalism in America. I also urge you to read or watch Freakonomics or listen to their podcast (freakonomics raido). Or the documentary Saving Capitalism on Netflix. You can also look at this site for a little more information about wealth inequality in America.
