…Or So I Argued to an Unnecessarily-Defensive Buddhist the Other Night
I had the beginnings of a decent conversation with an argumentative white California Buddhist the other night at the Intermission of a local cabaret. I’ve had versions of this debate before, but twenty years ago I basically argued his point, and now I find myself defending the side of capitalism…at least the idea of capitalism. White Buddhist California guy said we should arrange our society around something other than economics, something that doesn’t require competition. I said that capitalism is a decent system, but added the caveat that in the last forty years or so, it’s been so thoroughly hijacked and gamed that it’s not what it once was, what it should be.
Buddhist white guy Californian suggested Democracy as a decent alternative, and I had to shut up (not a natural thing for me) and consider his point for a minute. I asked him if he thought direct democracy was even possible. He retorted with, “Who knows? It’s never been tried.” I think I have to begrudgingly grant him a small measure of respect. Sure, I hate that California privileged white guy Buddhism nonsense as much as the next red-blooded American, but direct democracy would, at least, be an interesting experiment. It might fail miserably, but could it really be any worse than the “representative” Republic system we have now, where most of those faux-representatives only really represent the guys who write them the checks?
Is the opinion about infrastructure spending of the guy who builds the highways really going to be less informed than the rich guy who owns the chain of Dollar Stores? The rich guy has probably never built a road. Of course, I’ve never built a road either, and most Americans have just as little road building experience as I do (as I don’t?). Once I shook myself out of that momentary haze, lost in the hopeful possibility of actual direct democracy (which would, at least be a government of, for and by the people, and if we fuck it up we’d have only ourselves to blame), I ran straight back to my original debate.
Capitalism isn’t inherently a bad system. It’s just gotten so out-of-whack in the last few generations that it’s hard to see the foundational positives, unless you’re on the top of the money heap. What has American capitalism lost recently that we once had in abundance? Competition for one. What else? Non-gamed, non-too-big-to-allow-freedom regulators. What, pray tell, else? A shared sense of at least a semblance of decency.
Competition and capitalism need each other. When one industry gets controlled by an oligopoly (2-4 companies running almost all of it, Coke and Pepsi style) then everything starts to suck for everyone, except of course for the corporate executives at those 2-4 companies. Even now they can’t just straight-up divvy up the entire market share between the two of them, but they can come close enough to lick the cherry-flavored lollipop of monopoly. Even Coke and Pepsi have some small competitors, but since there are more than one of them, they can neatly avoid the monopoly label and can continue cornering their markets with ease and a little collusion. What are some other formerly competitive markets that are now oligopolies? For example…EVERYTHING. Pretty much everything is now a cornered market. Nike and New Balance. Penzoil and Quaker State. It doesn’t matter what they make, not really. The system is such that the market gamers have so much power and money they can fairly easily stamp out their competition. When a new start-up in an industry does something groundbreaking, something revolutionary, and it looks like they might upset the oligopoly apple cart, the colluders either under-price them and put them out of business, get their political henchmen to investigate them and put them out of business or they just buy them up and claim the groundbreaking idea for their own or spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign to convince us that it wasn’t so revolutionary after all.
This is bad for consumers, bad for competition, bad even the employees at those companies who can now more easily be replaced by cheaper outsourced labor or more likely robots.
Back in the distant past, we had regulatory agencies with clear missions, small enough not to get in the way of actual business, and dedicated enough to take down corporate criminals. Now we’ve got the worst of both worlds. They’re lazy, stuffed with former and future executives OF the very companies they supposedly regulate, AND they’ve burdened everyone with too many small, terrible rules. They’re both crooked and too bureaucratic. That’s hard to pull off. You’ve almost got to plan that shit out, it’s so crazy.
Defense contractors buying off regulators. SEC agents bribed with offshore accounts or future jobs. The FCC allowing a handful of media conglomerates waaaayyy too much of the markets, leading to the world’s most propagandistic news, other than the news in those places where it’s seriously obvious propaganda. And I bet North Korean news is at least as informative as MSNBC or Fox News. At least North Koreans don’t think their station is giving them the unvarnished truth. Too many of us aren’t as intelligent and discerning as your average North Korean road paver, assuming they have paved roads in North Korea, and how would I know, since my “news” has never in-depth reported such a thing?
Without even the former sliver of decency left in the basic morality of our economic system, we’re also in a bent-over, assuming the position, heavily about to be screwed hard position. It doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve been convinced that American capitalism is a winner-take-all proposition, a zero-sum game, and it often IS now, but it doesn’t have to be. We can all grow our own tomatoes in our yards and still occasionally buy some Prego marinara. If they still made cars that we could fix ourselves (another clear gaming of the system), we’d still sometimes need to take the old Dodge Rambler to mechanics.
Corporate espionage wouldn’t exist if we had a little human decency built into the system. Soon-to-be-fired-for-robbing-their-own-company-blind-and-possibly-spending-company-money-on-their-bi-annual-sex-trips-to-Thailand CEOs wouldn’t be able to give themselves multi-million dollar golden parachutes if decency pervaded the economic landscape. We wouldn’t need as many corporate performance reviews in that system, because those things are mainly excuses for firing your ass somewhere down the line. We wouldn’t even need that big an HR department, since other than hiring and firing, their other tasks would be rendered mostly moot. You don’t need sexual harassment seminars in a world without sexual harassment.
Shit, now I sound like the California Buddhist white guy, don’t I? Well, he wasn’t all bad. Yes, my burning desire to make fun of Buddhist white California guys is strong. How could it not be? Those are the close relatives of the morons who gave us kombucha, kale chips, kale smoothies, fake milk made from almonds and/or kale, and snowboarding as an Olympic event. Even still, maybe that guy, from a douche-bag tribe though he may be, had a decent point about democracy and capitalism. I won’t hold him personally responsible for the plague of avocado-flavor infesting our potato chip aisle.