Laissez Faire Capitalism is Disgusting and Immoral

Rebuttals The technology is only available to the majority of people (in the developed world anyway) as a result of government intervention. In all of the grown-up countries, there are systems of healthcare that socialise this technology, thus making it available to the masses. Anyway, not all technological advancements are done by capitalism. Penicillin, the motorway, Volkswagen, computers, the internet, space travel, most modern weapons, nuclear power, motorways, calculators, the biro, wind power, GPS, formula milk, the microchip, amphetamines and most modern vaccinations were all either invented by people in government departments, or mostly funded by the government in developing. We would still have these with socialism, or even communism, but since it would have been unprofitable to introduce many of them, capitalism would not have invented many of them. I think you are forgetting that the USSR put the first man in space, as well as the first satellite and space station, and also the radio antenna and the prototype for the mobile phone. Necessity is the mother of invention, not capitalism. Anyway, in the US, if it was not for the questionable schemes of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare, they would not be available to all of the previously 'unfit' people, and there are many 'unfit' people (forty million at a conservative estimate) that still do not receive the medical inventions. The market is order, I concede. It is order intended to benefit the few over the many, to ensure that the plebs line up to work for the benefit of the few, and occasionally allow a few of them to ascend to their ranks as part of the pyramid scheme. You are adhering to Smith's principles in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which advocate the Invisible Hand, and everybody striving to do well for themselves would somehow mean that even if people miss their objective of becoming billionaires, they would still have increased their own wealth substantially. This is a pyramid scheme, since if it worked, which it doesn't, it would require an unlimited stream of people to form the underclass to work as chattel for the people who have succeeded. Smith's theory was superseded by most academics and people with minimal knowledge of economics by Nash and von Neumann's Game Theory in the seventies, and this was cemented by Friedmann admitting that his ideas about laissez faire capitalism and the money supply were flawed. I agree with you that the wage spike is no coincidence. We had this little thing called the industrial revolution, which started in Britain in the mid eighteenth century, and became widespread as populations grew substantially thanks to successive good harvests; and new technologies were invented and adopted such as Newcomen and Watt's steam engines, etc., which increased production substantially. In the capitalist economies of Britain, France and the USA, the desire for raw materials to fuel the industrial revolution motivated them to seek resources overseas in Africa and India in the case of Britain and France, and further west, in the case of the USA. But the Industrial Revolution was not a purely capitalist phenomenon. Russia and China did not experience their industrial revolutions until the twentieth centuries. Under Stalin in Russia, there were a series of x year plans to mechanise agriculture and build new factories, hence the alliance of hammer and sickle. Similarly, under Mao in China, there was the Great Leap Forward, a somewhat more successful attempt at kickstarting an industrial revolution that was consolidated by Xiaoping and built the foundations for China to become the world's preeminent power. Before capitalism, there was mercantilism, a sort of half-baked form of state capitalism that revolved around controlling trade that brought a wage spike to areas that did a lot of trading such as Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and the Baltic. It had many of the hallmarks of capitalism, in that the wealth was largely concentrated in some entrenched pseudo-aristocrats at the top, and the wealth trickled down gradually to the masses in both financial terms and in terms of providing services, such as sanitation or infrastructure. Standards of living were not, as your link says, 'the best that society could afford'. They were considered to be appalling by their peers as well. Society could afford to improve the conditions considerably. Perhaps you should look at the lavish conditions of the rich at the time, in the face of mass poverty. The top five percent of people owned forty percent of the country's wealth, and in places such as London, Manchester and Liverpool, the aristocracy, gentry and capitalists enjoyed double the life expectancy and roughly six times the literacy rate of the workers. The lack of knowledge about any alternatives is not an excuse either. Writers existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that championed the causes of redistribution, worker self-management and anarchism. Thomas Paine, Camille Desmoulins, Jacques Hebert, Gracchus Babeuf, Robert Owen, Claude de Rouvroy, David Ricardo, Pierre Leroux, Wilhelm Weiting, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, Charles Hall and Charles Fourier are just a few eighteenth and nineteenth century writers that were anti-capitalist or pro-socialist in terms of ideology, and some of the ideas could go back as far as the teachings of Jesus, Mazdak, Plato and Aristotle. The ideas were present, and there were movements of workers that started quasi-trade unions as early as medieval times, in addition to the guilds, which were essentially trade unions for professionals to ensure that the correct amount was produced. During the Industrial Revolution however, attempts at equity were vigorously, often violently, resisted by the ruling classes. The actions of industrialist Robert Owen are an example of what the Industrial Revolution could have been. By pooling the profits and distributing them to workers according to their output in a medium-sized community in Indiana, Owen managed to improve the standards of living of the ordinary people dramatically by providing services such as healthcare and education free of charge, forbidding child or slave labour and using the profits of industry to improve working and living conditions in the surrounding area. Entrenchment is what has caused capitalism to flourish against the odds, at any sign of a labour dispute or the spread of ideas, they would send in private strikebreakers to intimidate or assault the people defying them, bombard them with propaganda and use temporary workers instead, firing all the workers that dared to demand better conditions. The wage and standard of living increases of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were caused by a mixture of union action to demand better conditions and pay, which compelled the employers and the government to introduce things such as the minimum wage, social security and safety regulations; government legislation such as public health legislation, the introduction of free and compulsory education, healthcare, social security, improved systems of welfare and public works projects like new sewers, housing and paved roads, all done by the government; and the adoption of new procedures such as the internal combustion engine, electricity and the telephone, all of which made production less costly, more productive and more efficient. Capitalism was also not necessarily responsible for these. In the Soviet Union, agriculture was mechanised with tractors and agrichemistry without the assistance of capitalism, and after a few major issues were dealt with, it had a very strong agricultural sector, and as a result, higher population growth and a higher standard of living. Saying that there was actually a universal wage spike rather than a spike in the industrialised countries is a fallacy in itself, since the spike has hardly reached most of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Yes, GDP growth has increased, but living standards have plummeted, as have real wages and literacy rates, while rates of undernourishment, death, suicide, murder, crime and wealth inequality have all skyrocketed. Examples of this include Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Russia and Nigeria. I didn't just cite Pinochet and Thatcher for the horrors created in instituting free market capitalism, but for the negative consequences of the policies themselves. They also indicate that free-market capitalism does not lead to freedom, because it exerts authority over others in order to entrench itself. Money is a very powerful tool for influencing individuals and populations, and as long as they are pacified with some of them becoming wealthy, thus giving the rest of the population the impression that they would be too; the system can continue. Pinochet's reforms resulted in a huge crash that brought the economy of Chile to its knees due to the avarice of the mining companies and the reductions in productivity caused by the lowering of the standard of living. This meant that the government had to nationalise more of the economy than it previously had, and the crisis was narrowed by a New Deal-style economic programme. Thatcher and her peers and successors' reforms culminated in the financial crisis of 2008 and the current recession, caused by the housing bubble that functioned as a Ponzi scam in which the people that arrived at it too late bore the main blows, while those who got in early were virtually untouched. However, I agree that the statement about dictatorships and the need for popular movements in favour of an ideology was spot on. It applies to socialism as much as capitalism, though I challenge you to find any examples of countries that went from socialism to capitalism in the developing world through peaceful action. Also, the Labour Party's rhetoric suggests otherwise, as does the rewriting of Article 4.