The Trouble With Capitalism, Part 2

In my last post, I laid the groundwork for a killer argument of some type, something about capitalism.  I pointed out that partisan rancor has caused me to take this on, at least partially, and explained why I am a left-leaning centrist, and why I mistrust conservatives.

Today, I will lay out an argument that we're all in much bigger trouble than we think, or maybe we're already dead, depending on who you ask, and it's all the fault of capitalism.  It will probably take me a few more posts to get it made, but I will argue that capitalism, as a system of economic principles, has limits, but our current regime(s) have largely ignored these limits on ideological, rather than rational, grounds.

My grand point is best illustrated anecdotally.  I could have chosen thousands of anecdotes just like this. This is a summary of the introduction of the incomparable tome, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan:  food science has always been inexact and corrupted by bureaucracy influenced by business dollars, maybe more so than other scientific fields.  In summary, in 1977, George McGovern's Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was preparing to issue a report stating that people who ate more meat and dairy products and fewer agricultural goods were more likely than others to die of certain diseases, such as heart disease.  One piece of evidence, among many, was that when dairy and meat were rationed during World War II, heart disease rates temporarily plummeted, only to return to rising once American diets were restored to "normal" after the war.   But when the committee prepared to offer its recommendations to the public, the meat and dairy lobbies had a fit, and since it's their money that determines the next class of senators, eventually their desires were capitulated to and the recommendations instead spoke of the nutrient classes within the foods that were the culprit for heart disease.  Instead of saying there should be less red meat in a person's diet, it recommended less saturated fat.  By disconnecting the food from its nutrients, those invisible devils, bad nutrients, could be excoriated and good nutrients could be sanctified, but their unknown connection to each other and to the food they were in could be ignored, as could chemicals in food as yet unknown to science.  Meanwhile, meats and other protein sources were elevated to "main dish" status by those same lobbies, a diet that is found virtually nowhere else on Earth, other than those places increasingly influenced by the so-called Western Diet, which has been shown over and over again to be the deadliest way to eat.  Those same lobbies spent large amounts of money in McGovern's state of South Dakota to defeat him, making the consequences of any government agents or agencies' move to specifically speak poorly of products with powerful lobbies clear--it is political suicide.

The lesson here is that business has an obligation to look out for itself using its considerable wealth and the influence that it buys.  It creates an information inequality with the perverse incentive of keeping information secret when it is profitable, even where it hurts the consumer long-term.  The Supreme Court's finding that banning corporations from spending unlimited quantities of money on PACs is a violation of their first amendment rights took this troubling pattern to its dire extreme.

In my next blog, I'll write about the most insidious example of this information inequality: oil.  Just a primer: if you were an oil executive, and you knew the supply of oil wouldn't last very long, but that if you were to say publicly how long it would last, people would make large changes to their lifestyle that would ruin your business and its enormous influence, profitability, and infrastructure, would you keep it a secret, or serve the greater good by helping the public prepare for the calamity of oil running out?  I wouldn't tell them either.  There's a very perverse incentive...

The Trouble With Capitalism, Part 1

Well, kick the blocks aside, here it goes...

I try to use politics in the USA as theater, solely for entertainment purposes, and with the emphasis on those most interesting characters that exist in the government.  They aren't hard to spot, normally: the Huffington Post likes to put their names in headlines, with pictures carefully chosen to show caricatured emotion and headlines as thoughtful as "Bad News for..." or "Good News for..."  I've read in histories of the United States and have seen in news stories with a nostalgic twist that the problems we face now are only the new ones, that people in the past have seen problems, viewed in historical context, that mirror and sometimes dwarf those in modern times.

But my ability to be less emotional about it is flagging.  In the last year and some change, I've seen, read, heard, and faced, personally, some insidious problems in politics that simply go beyond theater and run into life-changing.  For example, I am a teacher.  I like being a teacher.  But there are some changes taking place within those bodies of people who shovel money that affect what happens in my school and my classroom every day.  I worry about the direction these people seem to be taking and why each day seems more difficult than the last.

Specifically, what worries me is twofold: one, many people have allowed pols to hijack their votes on social issues, God and such, when applying their votes this way is actually doing them economic harm. Because of this, a new, weird kind of politician, one that would have caused sane people to eat lunch somewhere else if they sat down and started talking just one year ago, are becoming the ones wielding the power in this country.  They are neoconservative, they are plutocratic, and they are ideological to the detriment of everything else.  But most of all, they are persistent.  Two, with the gap in income equality widening at an alarming rate and the middle class, myself one of its last vestiges, disappearing into a sea of joblessness and foreclosure, people are increasingly blaming government and demanding government disappear as punishment.  Those weird politicians have convinced normal, healthy-minded people that government, even applied correctly, is the problem, and that, and this is the most important point I can make here starting out, big business and the wealthy people who own/run it are the answer.

What's alarming here is that anyone who could stay awake in history class knows that mistrust of business and alarm at its callous and evil deeds is cyclical.  Upton Sinclair wears the mascot costume here.  But this time seems different from the Robber Baron days, in that we are aware of unchecked business' caustic principles because they're the reason my school has no money, roughly 9% of Americans are unemployed, and many of us owe far more on our homes than we could ever recover in a sale, those of us who still have homes, that is.  And yet, political rhetoric in favor of deregulation, fewer and less taxes on the wealthy, and taxes on the large corporations that persist in profit while many of us stagnate and disintegrate continues to convince large swaths of Americans (and politicians who used to hold the line against such rhetoric) that our alarm is unfounded in this cycle.  It's the Roaring 20s all over again.

That's sort of my position.  I am a centrist.  But I would like to make the point in my next post, my indictment of capitalism the way it is going right now, that centrism is not the average of conservative and liberal.  In addition, as I clarify (in my own head) what I'm doing here, I will write more on what I believe I am uniquely qualified to write about, the interface between politics and science.  Until then, ciao!