I can’t remember when I started hearing people identifying themselves as capitalists, but I am sure it was over a year ago. People probably used the term before that, but I just wasn’t taking notice. In any event, I have been paying some attention to the ways that these self-described capitalists are behaving and find myself a bit troubled.
They seem to all agree that regulations are bad. I keep hearing that the “marketplace is self-regulating.” They want me to have faith that any excesses will be trimmed by the healthy competition that will result from an unregulated economy.
I bumped into an interesting passage in a book I was reading not long ago. Essentially, the author was explaining that humans are innately greedy and if we elect them to positions with too much power they will abuse that power at our expense. Greed is the word that was seared into my brain by Michael Douglas in that movie about Wall Street when he said that “greed is good!” It isn’t an adjective I am comfortable using because it often sends the conversation into overdrive. Greed is relevant here because, if this author is right and humans are innately greedy, it means that the marketplace controls greed with greater greed – it means that competition is somehow fueled by greed and winning is an emotion resulting from satisfying our greed. Somehow I don’t think any of the Olympic athletes would agree with that idea.
It was surely my parents who taught me that it wasn’t proper to take the last piece of cake if there were others who hadn’t yet eaten dessert. Compassion for others is the message here and it would seem that compassion is keeping that innate greed in check. Compassion might be an adjective for morality or moral thinking and good morals are something we were taught to strive for. “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you” was firmly planted in my psyche long before Michael Douglas was born and I don’t remember anything in those lessons that would be considered an exception for capitalists or capitalistic practices. In fact, I don’t remember any qualifications or disclaimers of any kind when these life lessons were being learned.
So, what has happened? Somehow the modern day capitalist has come to think that showing compassion for others is a bad thing. “It’s not personal – just business.” Productivity, in a macro sense, is revenue divided by labor. If we accept that definition and make the compensation of a typical capitalist be related to the productivity of a company, we shouldn’t be surprised when he cranks the assembly line up to full throttle and fires everyone because as the denominator of a fraction approaches zero the value of the fraction approaches infinity. Everybody would be wiped out except our imaginary capitalist, but “it’s just business.”
I think I’ll take up a different argument. I’ll take the position that compassion is still appropriate in all cases and capitalism is no exception. I’ll take the position that morality is not something to be left by the door when we walk into our workplace. I’ll take the position that the innate greed of humans sneaks into our capitalistic exchanges because we are failing to exercise control over our own behavior.
Let’s get real here! The stockholders aren’t going to demand the firing of the CEO when they believe there has been too much compassion shown to the labor force. Running a company requires balance and while there may be disagreement about how to balance the many parameters of a particular business; nobody will get fired for doing a good job of keeping things in balance.
Circling back to the role of government for a moment and we will have to admit that not all capitalists arrive at work each morning with their compassion holding their greed in control so some regulation is necessary. I’ll go a bit further and say that when some regulation is necessary, the proper amount of that regulation is the business of good government and, right now, we definitely do not have good government.
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