Capitalistic ideology is bad

As this has kind of been a makeshift debate, I'll attempt to reassert the arguments/responses from the entire thing. In creating a state, people rely on others for certain goods and services that each provides. Soon, it becomes obvious that some tasks need to be performed. Society needs X number of farmers, X number of doctors and so on. It would be nice to think that these X's could be determined by passion, but it is not that simple. Human nature is not to simply pursue passion because pursuing passion does not correlate to a functioning society. If everyone were to pursue passion, countless necessary functions would go undone. The number of people who are passionate about collecting garbage and cleaning bathrooms certainly doesn't meet the demand society places on those tasks. There is no reason why people would perform undesirable tasks. I don't assume everyone would want to pick up trash. In fact its the opposite. No one would want to perform these undesirable duties if they have no reason or obligation to do so. Human nature is to strive to happiness. On this we agree. There is more to people than a base survivalist mentality. Based on this is the concept of benefit and sacrifice. A garbageman is not going to sacrifice his time and resources in order to clean for the whole society when his needs are not met in turn. Here, the barter system develops. The garbageman exhanges his services for others that he requires. Money replaces the barter system out of efficiency. Money is not a bad thing intrinsically. How do these function together? Well, people want to be happy. But, society makes these people abandon their passion proffesionally out of necessary survival and functionality. Therefore, people have to perform tasks they are not passionate about in order to be able to have the ability to do passionate or happy things. Since, we can both agree, people want to be happy. In order to be happy, the garbageman exchanges his services for money, which enables him to ensure his survival and then pursue this happiness. It is not a matter of greed, but pursuing this passion. So, rather than being greedy, people are simply seeking this passion. Why can't they simply perform basic, uninnovated things that make them happy? Because, in order for a society to be functional, we have to ignore passion at first and ensure survival. Passion is great. We should all pursue our passion, but that is impossible in the face of societal necessity. The pursuit of passion does not allow us to survive. While a passionate life may outwiegh a suurvivalist one, survival is a prerequisite to the pursuit of passion. Stemming from this, the garbageman is naturally going to want to maximize the results of his undesirable service so he can pursue the happiness. This is where the notion of greed develops. Capitalism doesn't breed greed, human nature does. People actually do want to be happy as much as they can be. The doctor you mentioned gets pleasure out of helping/curing people. That is his societal function, it just happens to cause his happiness. But, as for people who have to perform undesirable things as a societal function, happiness is an after effect. Meaning, we must perform our undesirable function in order to attain happiness. Therefore, maximizing our societal function (making money), allows us to maximize our happiness (human nature is to be happy). Money itself is not an objective, the happiness we get from money is. Your quantification of life is fulfilled in this principle. Life is "how much happiness one can achieve throughout ones life". The Africa problem and profit hungry CEO's are not problems of capitalism, but rather human nature. People, for the most part, are egoists. They look out for themselves and make sure they can accrue lots of happiness. I agree, they shouldn't, we should help those people in Africa, CEO's shouldn't be greedy, but this is an undeniable fact of the way people (generally) are. You may argue that capitalism facilitates this terrible nature of ours. Well, this is what makes capitalism a good ideology. The common problem with other ideologies is that they ignore this inherent lust for happiness that we all have. Capitalism facilitates and attempts to groom it into something productive. Capitalism is not the blind greedy hunt you make it out to be, but a free-market in which people are enabled to facilitate this raw search for happiness into a societally beneficial ambition. Also, capitalism has its benefits. Competition through the free market and the innovation that competition breeds allow us, at the most basic level, to have more heppiness and live better in general. As I stated before, medicines and new technologies that incite more happiness and a better opportunity to live would not be around without innovation. This is not a matter of moral imperialism or whether or not the big bad U. S. should give to these whiney inferior Africans, it is a simple objective fact that innovation bred these things. These things make happiness and life more accessible and maximized. Whether we think we are morally superior is not the issue. The fact is these things exist because of capitalist innovation, devoid of any kind of moral quandry. The fact is that these CEO's witholding resources that would save millions of lives is a result of poor human nature, not the capitalist system. Capitalism is good because it facilitates these terrible human tendencies into a societally beneficial institution. The mere fact that these things exist is because of capitalism. You can't equate all of the bad things that happen in a capitalist institution as faults of capitalism. That would be like saying "Priests are molesting kids. This ensures that the Catholic faith is bad." You can't draw a correlation just because two things are contemporaneous. The fact is, capitalism is good because it counteracts and facilitates our selfish, baser human nature into something good. The fact that capitalism appears to be a greed machine is due to human nature, not the institution itself. These African people are dying because the CEO's are ethically unsound, not because capitalism tells us or allows us to ignore others in the face of greed. Capitalism was born out of a collective spirit, not out of the bad reputation it has amongst popular opinion. Is the institution ideal of perfect? Obviously not. But that does not mean it is generally bad. Should we care? Yes. Do we? No. That is our fault, not the institution's.