Laissez Faire Capitalism is Disgusting and Immoral

Laissez Faire Capitalism is the equivalent of getting a thousand dogs in a room and throwing meat in. The stronger dogs overpower the weaker dogs, killing or wounding them, and get all the meat for themselves, while the weaker dogs go hungry. In fact, this metaphor is too complementary to Laissez Faire Capitalism. In the metaphor, the stronger dogs don't force the weaker dogs to make more meat for them, with the promises of someday giving them some meat of their own. Laissez Faire Capitalism is not freedom. It leads to authoritarianism in its most brute form, that of the likes of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza. It is the act of a government relinquishing its responsibility to guarantee the welfare and freedom of its citizens, instead favouring what helps the elite. Anyone who believes that it is freedom must merely look at its effects. Not in the spacious Gatsby-esque mansions in Beverly Hills we are shown are the result of hard work and dedication, but in the developing world, where people toil to manufacture consumer goods for the people in better off countries. I shall give three examples of Laissez Faire Capitalism in action, and we shall see the extent of the excellence of the ideology. The Pinochet Regime in Chile is an excellent example of Laissez Faire Capitalism, partly due to its distilled nature, partly due to its contrast with the Allende Regime before it. Allende was the left-leaning, but more importantly, democratically elected, President of Chile. Chile's principle export was copper, and the mines had been nationalised in the 1960s. In 1972, the height of Allende's popularity, Chileans had the highest standard of living ever previously enjoyed, with universal healthcare, social housing and free milk for children. However, this annoyed President Nixon and the mining corporations that backed him, so they orchestrated a coup in 1973. General Augusto Pinochet took power as part of a junta, and ruled a military dictatorship until 1990 (incidentally, his best friend Margaret Thatcher, an equally odious and repugnant creature was removed from power). During that time, Pinochet's strings were pulled by a clique known as 'The Chicago Boys', a group of US investment bankers and corporate executives that ran Chile's economy. The mines were privatised, as was the countryside, and even basic resources, such as water and road maintenance, were sold to foreign investors. This resulted in a dive in Chilean living standards, and ultimately resulted in an economic collapse that required the government to renationalise all of the industries Pinochet privatised, and more after that. Not only did his economic policies result in disaster, but his reign saw one of the worst periods of atrocities and human rights abuses ever seen. By the end of 1973, his first year as ruler, two hundred and fifty thousand people were being detained in concentration camps worse than those of the Nazis, with nearly four thousand people dead, another eighty thousand people incarcerated and two hundred thousand placed into exile. Pinochet enjoyed the unwavering support of senile despot-lovers Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with his death squads and secret police receiving all training and equipment from MI6 and the CIA. No elections were held until 1988, when Pinochet was beaten, but refused to step down until 1990. Pinochet's Chile is one of the best examples of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and did it result in freedom for all, preserving peoples' rights and giving Chileans a good standard of living? No, no, and of course not. Capitalism is the opposite of freedom. Britain under Thatcher and the IMF is another example of capitalism at its best. Prior to the IMF's imposition of neoliberalism in 1976, Britain had enjoyed almost full employment under Atlee and Wilson's socialist governments, with high taxes for the rich, excellent provisions for all in the forms of social housing, universal healthcare and a huge public sector that encompassed hospitals, steelworks, shipyards, telecommunications and mines. Thatcher privatised all of these save the NHS, and almost all state-owned factories were closed; not because they were not making profits, but because the margins were not big enough to fill the pockets of the investors. This resulted in mass unemployment in huge swathes of the country, namely the post-industrial North, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Midlands and Wales. Places such as Essex only recovered because the increased demand for housing in London spilled out into the Home Counties, thus perpetuating the North-South Divide that still persists to this day. Poverty rose from 10.5% in 1975 to 22.8% in 1990, and has never fallen below 18% since. Unemployment increased from 700,000 in 1975 to 3,000,000 in 1982, which amounted to over ten percent of the population, the worst levels seen since the Great Depression. Since then, unemployment has not gone below 1,500,000. This figure is exacerbated further if one looks at the structural and regional unemployment, which rose to 75% in some areas centred around industries closed by the dogs Thatcher threw the public sector to. The same can be said for her cosmetically adequate GDP growth, which was almost entirely concentrated on London and the Southeast, while the rest of the country was both stagnating or declining. Also, with her union-bashing, she destroyed British Trade Unionism, the only way in which the workplace can be subject to democracy; and also eradicated the Labour Party's main source of funds, which meant that they had to look for funds in the same place as her, therefore under Blair, they adopted the same policies as her successor Major; and today, voters in the UK have the choice between the centre-right Conservatives, the centre-right Liberal Democrats and the centre-right Labour Party. No other parties are politically viable for office, and the three major parties are virtually indistinguishable in terms of their policies. This means that she turned Britain into a Dictatorship of the Corporation, as the corporations determine party politics and therefore government policy by supporting candidates that look after their interests, effectively purchasing elections. Even a libertarian such as yourself must acknowledge that a country can only call itself a democracy when the people can choose between parties which have different lines. The Labour Party is now pro-austerity, pro-privatisation and anti-immigration. Blair extended the policies of Thatcher and Major, and extended their effects, thus depriving the British people of an alternative to neoliberalism. The social costs of Thatcher's policies were disgusting, and the policies themselves, which consisted of what former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described as 'Selling off the family silver', were immoral, since they transferred the stake in society previously held by the citizenry to the investors, centralising power in the City of London and in foreign investors, neither of which can be considered accountable. Along with her ally Ronald Reagan, another free-market fetishist, she created the low-tax, deregulated conditions that caused the banking crisis and the global recession of today, yet the media, which is almost exclusively owned by people who supported her thanks to her policies, idolised her then and have canonised her now. She boasted about being the first leader to beat back socialism, as if that was a good thing, and, along with her pets Howe and Lawson, ruined the lives of millions of people, not just in Britain, but across the world with all of the dictators she supported, such as the aforementioned Pinochet, kleptocrats Mobutu of Zaire and Suharto of Indonesia, and genocidal feudalist Pol Pot of Cambodia, whose army that killed an estimated three million Cambodians was supplied and trained by British special forces; and fun-hating puritan fascists the Taliban of Afghanistan, who were trained and armed by MI6 and the CIA. All of these were supported because they were either fighting or suppressing democratic left wing sentiment. In the words of Fidel Castro, They talk about the failure of socialism, but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?