Regulation - Capitalism - Rational Self Interest

[Placid Dingo]

There's a phrase that keeps coming back to me. Rational self interest. It's a key concept inside of Capitalism, which more or less says that nobody needs to make Capitalism work, because it just does. The reason it just does is because it's in an individual's self interest to do things that happen to work out well for everyone.

Adam Smith in his work Wealth of Nations discusses the importance of regulation. Regulation is an important element because it prevents the abuse of power to the detriment of the people.

At some point we started a weird split in the way we talked about capitalism, dividing things into Capitalist and Anti-Capitalist. We started to buy into the idea that regulation or restriction was, rather than being a way of the public exercising their own rational self interest through the actions of their elected representatives, inherently anti-Capitalist.

In the same way we tend to scorn people who try to change or oppose the system, which is odd because they're following the same human laws that make Capitalism possible. Only for some reason they've decided their lives are better served by acting outside of the maintream.

Regulation is an element of Capitalism; an element that is in the rational self interest of the people whose needs are served by the Capitalist system. There are a variety of ways to interact with Capitalism, and the way that serves your self interest is the right one. Corporations are part of Capitalism but they have no right to define it.