Bloomberg's Mark Gilbert offers an interesting take on the global outlook in his July 9th column "Grandad, tell how capitalism committed suicide".
Basic thesis: In wealthy countries, people got too greedy and borrowed too much, while in poorer countries their rising aspirations lead to competition for resources and rampant inflation. Examples ensue. My favourite is:
``Capitalism sowed the seeds of its own demise because the benefits of a decade-long boom accrued to capital, with nothing flowing to labor. Telling workers who hadn't had a decent pay raise for years to tighten their belts once the good times ended proved disastrous.Seems to me any ideology is only as good as the people who attempt to make it real. One can make a credible argument that Communism as an ideal is wonderful, but people are too selfish, lazy and corrupt to make it real. The same can be said for most religions where people fail to live up to the ideal and even pervert it into justification for war when the core message is for peace.
``People started to realize that just because communism had lost, that didn't mean capitalism had won. Cracks started to appear. In New Zealand, the government nationalized the country's rail and ferry services, deciding it could do a better job of running the transport network than private industry.
Capitalism is just one more ideology that would appear to have been undermined by selfishness, sloth and corruption. Recent years are littered with fraudulent accounting, dodgy investment (sub-prime mortgages and related securities) and many other scams that have consumed and destroyed nominal wealth on a scale previously unknown in human history. Then we must also consider the REAL cost of all this profligate waste in terms of resources consumed and environment degraded......for what?
Anyone with a clue can see from the outset unregulated capitalism can only lead to monopoly / oligopoly, effective extortion (monopoly rents) and waste. The problem in recent years is that the capitalists have taken over the regulatory bodies in too many jurisdictions and the human potential for selfishness, sloth and corruptions has been realised more fully than is good for us. Instead of inhibiting damaging excess, too often captured regulators have enabled more dmaaging excess. This is particularly evident in the United States in the FERC (Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission) and the nuetering of the EPA (Evironmental protection Agency). In the case of the EPA, the crony-capitalist Bush White House simple marks its reports of degrading environmental conditions "return to sender" and refuses to accept them.
I'm a pragmatist. Ideology is for the faith-ridden. I'm not one of them. Capitalism is no better than the people within it...and was further hindered by treating as a virtue those negative human drivers that would ultimately undermine it.
