Capitalism hasn’t failed. The people who run it have. While at a basic level, Capitalism comes down to “I have greed, and you have need. Let’s do a deal!”, we all know there is much more to it than that. Otherwise none of us would get worked up over Globalisation(tm)and workers rights and the like. There is obviously a social element to Capitalism, both from “our” point of view, and also “theirs”.
Given this very human element, there comes a time where dead wood needs to be cut out of the system – for it to run at maximum wealth-creating efficiency. We normally call these recessions. The weak fall, the strong and the innovative survive. When you postpone a recession with massive public borrowing, that’s all you are doing – postponing it. Artificially propping up the weak can only last for so long before they fall off, like balancing a ball on a very thin stick.
When you get a recession, every weak element in the system will be tested. If you’ve postponed it, they’ll be tested massively. And they’ll fail, epically.
So, I state again, the reason why everything is completely fucked now isn’t so much the system (as flawed and distasteful as it may be), but the people who have allowed 2 or 3 recessions to hit us at the same time. Any system you replace Capitalism with will still be run by pretty much the same people. Even if they have different faces, they’ll still have the same flawed ideas. And we’ll be fucked again.
Change the ideas, THEN the system, and you may be onto something.
I’m going to disagree.
Free trade is what you describe. Capitalism is where the means of production are in private hands.
Furthermore, the current economic crisis may only invalidate the sort of hypercapitalistic dismantling of the buffers between national economies that existed earlier in the century, as well as the idea of selling things that don’t exist.
The problem is, in a truly “free” market, as understood by Anglo-Saxon variants of capitalism, then there are no rules against selling derivatives or sub-prime mortgages. And sure, you could claim that in a situation where the government did not intervene, businesses and banks would be more cautious…but I fucking doubt it.
Recessions don’t “weed out the weak”. They’re not evolution. They weed out businesses reliant on loans for expansion…and there are some very large and robust business which nonetheless require loans for various purposes, especially if their sales are seasonal or otherwise constricted, yet bring in big money.
Also those two lines sound far too close to “capitalism didn’t fail us…we failed IT” to my liking.
But then again, I’m not arguing to replace the system, so I suspect most criticisms have nothing to do with me anyway. I’m up for tweaking it, putting more economic powers in the hands of the individuals…but at the end of the day, most economic arguments made by non-economists are complete wank.
After reading that, I’d have to agree with your disagreement. I should really know better than to confuse capitalism with a free market economy, free trade or whatever else after all.
I guess I’ll leave economics based posting to others until I actually know a bit more about what I’m talking about, and don’t just think I do 🙂