The crisis of U.S. capitalism: time to pull the Dick of Cheney out of your ass

One achievement of the Bush administration that causes little comment, is that it has pulled the chain on U.S. capitalism; we're getting flushed down the toilet. By slashing taxes for the rich, and making life tougher on the poor, as well as saddling our economy with immense debt through reckless overspending, while not cutting back on corporate welfare, Bush has exacerbated the bad side of capitalism.

Yes, capitalism has two sides. The good side is the part that appeals to our self-interest, that gives entrepreneurs a free hand to pursue their ideas in the marketplace, and become rich in the process. It defines us as the greedy animals we are.

The bad side of capitalism is that it's not terrific at distributing wealth. The rich people get to keep everything. They suck up the wealth like an anteater hoovering an anthill. One way they get to keep everything is by running their companies with costs kept as low as possible. The very idea of a company totally beholden to its shareholders, is to rip off its workers as much as it can. That is one way Wal-Mart got to be the biggest corporation on earth. It pays its workers slave wages, and its owners are among the richest people in the world.

These two sides have to be balanced. A society needs an entrepreneurial spirit, otherwise it will ossify, as happened to Russia under Communism, which was great at distributing wealth, but useless at encouraging innovation and individual enterprise.

But it also needs a way of keeping the greed of entrepreneurs in check. Progressive taxation, free medical care, free education, money spent on infrastructure: in other words, the government must tax rich people in order to help poor people. That's how you get a stable society. You can't have the main body of citizenry standing bent over while it's being buggered by a big, fat Dick Cheney, and expect everybody to be chanting an Ode to Joy.

Here's Jeremy Rifkin on capitalism and communism:

Today, while corporate profits are soaring around the world, 89 countries find themselves worse off economically than they were in the early 1990s. Capitalism promised that globalization would narrow the gap between rich and poor. Instead the divide has widened. The 356 richest families on the planet enjoy a combined wealth that now exceeds the annual income of 40% of the human race. Two-thirds of the world's population have never made a phone call and one-third have no access to electricity.

The champions of capitalism pledged to promote sustainable economic development; yet we continue to squander our remaining fossil-fuel reserves, spewing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, destroying the world's ecosystems and habitats, with the prospect of catastrophic climate change.

Our business leaders decried the corruption that permeated the old centralized communist regimes, while many engaged in equally egregious corporate corruption, bringing down some of the world's 'most trusted' companies.

Why have the two dominant ideologies of the industrial age so utterly failed? Because the central tenet of each was not sufficiently tempered by the antidote of the other. The central tenet of communism is best expressed in the oft-heard aphorism 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. In practice, however, communism created a form of paternalistic governance that robbed the individual of any semblance of autonomy. In the end, everyone was subject to the dictates of impersonal state-run bureaucracies.

The central tenet of capitalism is found in the words of the Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith. He believed that an invisible hand ruled over the market place, guaranteeing that everyone would eventually benefit, if only the market mechanism were left unencumbered. Neoconservative economists and politicians still believe this.

In reality, the invisible hand has turned out to be nonexistent. Left to its own internal logic, the unfettered market leads not to a bigger share of the economic pie for all but a 'winner takes all' endgame.

The best type of capitalism is happening in Europe, whose peoples enjoy great social benefits. The worst type of capitalism is in the U.S., whose people do NOT enjoy great social benefits. Illness can ruin a family. 30m Americans are what is called the working poor. They work hard, but they don't earn a living wage. Many of them work for businesses like Wal-Mart. Those 30m working poor are the proof that capitalism U.S. style is a failure. Even the remedy of being able to declare bankruptcy has been rolled back in favor of the rich. We're only 4% of the world's population, but we have 25% of the world's prison population. Our system disadvantages so many, we end up locking them behind bars, where instead of getting metaphorically butt-fucked, they experience it for real.

The U.S. needs to start adopting the European model. We need more socially-conscious capitalism, and less free-market capitalism. To the extent that we don't have it, we fail as a mature, civilized society. If it weren't for Social Security, which Bush has had to give up trying to destroy, we'd be quite backward. It's time for the nation to stand tall and straight again, and pull Robber Baron mentality out of our backsides.