I’ve noticed in some circles that there are quite a few disabled people who are convinced that a capitalist system/government will never treat them with respect or value their lives. It made me think about Helen Keller, whose political views were, I believe, shaped for similar reasons.
So, considering that disabled people generally need a lot more out of society than they are able to return, and thus tend to be poorer, are they right?
On average, probably.
Even if you’re an intelligent, charismatic handicapped man, who would make an excellent CEO, CEOs aren’t hired straight out of school. Usually, you have to work your way up the ladder. If you can’t type quickly, that will rule you out of a lot of starting menial jobs. If you can’t move around effectively, that might make a lot of sales jobs difficult. You certainly won’t be able to start in most jobs that require physical labor. If you need to go to the doctor’s a lot, you’re going to lose out on opportunities that others would be able to have access to.
If you can’t succeed well at the menial jobs, how are you supposed to work your way up the ladder, effectively?
But at the same time, a lot of disabled people aren’t just physically disabled. The sort of ailments that cause physical disabilities are also often going to cause mental disabilities as well. If you’re not smart nor physically capable, there’s going to be a strong limit on how far you can go.
But, at the same time, this is true for all of us. How many of us can be Dolph Lundgren, both highly intelligent and a natural fitness god? We class “disability” as a hard line, but really everything is on a spectrum. There are people just 1% too smart or too physically mobile to qualify for disability. If we look at a natural, unmodified free market, we’re really just rewarding people for what they do contribute to society, and that’s always going to be strongly related to what they can contribute to society. And, on the whole, rewarding people who can for doing tends to work out better for mankind as a whole than if you don’t reward people for putting in that effort to devote their full potential to giving to society.
We can say that the disabled are being shafted by this. Or we could say that we’re spinning the innovation flywheel faster, so that technologies are invented that prevent disabilities, that fix disabilities, or render them irrelevant.
To look at the long run, let’s say that 20 million disabled people have lived lives that were less pleasurable than almost all other Americans, from the period of 1900-2020. But then let’s say that in 2020, we develop CRISPR technology that allows us to prevent all causes of mental disability. And, in that same year, we invent biomechanical implants that hook into the nervous system and allow anyone to perform any physical task just as efficiently as any other human on the planet. Now, from 2020 until the end of humanity - encompassing billions or trillions of humans who would have potentially been disabled, not a single one will have a life that is in any way diminished from any other. Numerically, the balance between 20 million and a meaningful percentile of all human ever in all the rest of time, the less-thrilling lives of those 20 million is more than justified if it means that we get to those technological improvements in 2020.
If, instead, we say start a communist system where we say that the free market is unfair to humanity - as we are all fundamentally equal, yet it gives to us unequally - then suddenly those discoveries of CRISPR and biomechanical implants might take hundreds or thousands more years to be developed, if at all. If we look at your average communist country, the only time they ever innovated was by trying to keep up their image with a free market country, and even there, they ended up having to steal a lot of the technology just to do so. Countries who made no such attempt, like Cuba, simply sat stuck in the 1950s without ever doing anything to advance anything.
But, then again, we can look at the Scandinavean countries and say that the natural free market rewards people at a higher rate than is necessary to keep motivated to work to their best. We can try to do our best to make sure everyone’s life, today, is good while still working on the technologies of tomorrow.
So ultimately, my answer would be that the free market is, yes, fundamentally tilted away from rewarding disabled people. But at the same time, it’s almost certainly the savior of disabled people and not only is that something which is going to become more and more true in the immediate future, it’s already been true for quite some while. The percentage of disabled people, today, is significantly lower than it was in, say, medieval times. Technology has already started to render the question moot.
There is the fact that there is widespread prejudice against disabled people.
The above assumes that all decisions in a capitalist system are rational. But if you look at modern economics, one of the biggest problems is that people don’t make rational decisions.
Depends.
I recall watching a video of an Ayn Rand speech where she said something like in her Objectivist society, those relatively few individuals who for whatever reason are incapable of performing any work would largely be reliant on the benevolence of other people who choose to take care of them. The implication that there not being any formal safety nets.
Certainly there are plenty of disabled people currently who find meaningful work. Stephen Hawking for example. There’s no reason someone who loses their legs can’t be a computer programmer or hedge fund guy.
Disability insurance and other forms of insurance are also part of “capitalism” and serve to mitigate the effects of becoming disabled.
But generally speaking, total free market capitalism does skew in favor of those with greater intelligence and ability. So many disabled people might not be able to compete for certain jobs.
Many disabled people have that attitude, but not for any of the reasons given so far.
It’s much, much simpler than that–
money.
It costs money to cater to the average disabled person. Why would a business spend thousands of dollars to alter the building it’s in, so that 2% of the population can enter the premises? Read any factual account of a wheelchair-bound person before 1950 or so, and you’ll be astonished at how much of society was closed off to them, because of physical barriers. Architects used to choose sweeping flights of entrance stairs because of how they looked, not how they would affect people wanting to get into the building.
Apparently, a lot of people don’t understand how capitalism does and doesn’t work.
The main thing missing, is that these people think that capitalism decides it’s own parameters.
It doesn’t. Capitalism is a conceptual approach to managing financial interactions, among other things, but it requires the people utilizing it, to establish what the societies goals are, and what values to assign to each part of the system.
If someone decides that value is only to be derived from hours spent under narrow conditions, and that the goal of society is to discard and eject anyone who doesn’t contribute under those narrow conditions, then the logical result is that anyone with a handicap, including the handicaps of being old or being very young, will be among the debris.
But “capitalism” doesn’t make those decisions. The people who are running and managing it do.
OP refers to a subset of a very large group, and we’re short on info so I too was thinking along simpler lines. Would they feel more valued if they had more money?
Capitalism isn’t a political system like Communism. It is an engine that powers a political system. So the op’s question doesn’t really make sense. It’s like asking if it’s possible to use profit-based tax money as a source of funds to help the disabled. The answer, obviously, is yes.
If by “capitalist” the OP really means “Winner-take-all economic system unfettered by non-economic concerns”, then yes, since the disabled are (generally) less economically useful they will be left near or at the bottom.
As will all but a tiny handful of the normal people who are most adept at working the system to be at the top of the very steep pinnacle.
Whether that limit-case concept of an economic system resembles any current, past, or future economic system in actual use anywhere in the world is a different question.
Well, there is this guy.
Exactly … the political system has the higher mandate to promote the general welfare … which means we can take a small percentage of everyone’s profit and provide a minimal standard of living to the disabled …
Consider the financially irresponsible … capitalism would have them die of exposure if they run their rent money through a video poker machine, they would be homeless quite quickly … our government intervenes by providing a hovel they can live in free-of-charge …
It’s worth the money to feed the starving artists … they benefit society in a way that can’t be measured in financial gains …
Stephen Hawking is a major beneficiary of the National Health Service; he would not be alive today, let alone a renowned physicist if he’d be been born in a country with a “capitalist” health care system.
How do you figure? My state college was filled with quadriplegics in wheel chairs.
If anything the delay times of the NHS pose an increased risk to him.
Well, it can work for specific individuals; it depends on the disability and on other circumstances of their lives, such as what kind of environment they grow up in.
One of my clients was a very large multinational, I worked at their headquarters in Seville. They put a lot of effort into “accessibility” and did not discriminate by reason of disability at all. I used to wonder why, as it seemed to be a very, very strong principle, the kind of thing where if you’re caught Not Doing It you get fired so fast you land in another country. I found out why on the last workday before Christmas, when the Board of Directors walked all through that 6K-people office complex shaking hands. One of them, a founding member of the company, has no right arm: he’s got a babyhand coming directly out of the shoulder, no long bones. But he was born to a family that could send him to the Jesuits and later to study engineering in Deusto. His classmates and co-founders knew perfectly well the power of his brain.
He said it himself. And I assume by “state college” you meant a private college and those disabled students all had families paying tuition out of their own pocket or private charity instead of relaying on government grants or subsidized loan.
Would you rather be a disabled person in a subsistence economy, a palace economy, a manorialism economy, a mercantalism economy, or a capitalist economy? A capitalist might argue all these modern medicines, surgeries, and advanced prosthetics require capitalism to come about. Lots of state intervention there, though.
Capitalism can work well for anyone with enough capital, whether that be financial, social/cultural, educational or in terms of other personal qualities (ambition, determination, sheer hard work) - or an effective combination of some or all of them. Not a lot of disabled people have that.
I would like to have a job doing telephone customer service or data entry that will hire me and let me telecommute right out of the box. If I have to subject my body to the stresses of an <x> long commute, 8 hours of working with .5 or 1 hour of lunch somewhere in the middle with an <x> long commute home at the end, after about a week or so my chondrocalcinosis goes into flare and I end up sidelined into bed with the need of someone to lift me or help me shift into a wheelchair to go pee.
Look guys, as I once told the HR people that actually hired me to work State Farm Insurance in the call center [and that involved getting the licensing in 4 lines of insurance!] ALL telephone customer service is the same - the only difference is the ‘product’. I find pretty much no difference in the 200 call a day high stress ADT alarm service call center, working as a level 1 tech walking the customers through simple problems, call center for US Foodservice where I was a USDA commodities rep, and what SFI was asking me to do in their way low volume low stress [well to me] call center. I have something like 15 years of call center experience that also effectively includes training on a number of different data entry styles and systems … Once I have the product training, why should I need to be in a call center for a year or two before being considered for telecommuting? Ask my previous employers if I was dependable and be done with it. I have the space to set myself up with a separate room as an office where I can be isolated, I have high speed internet and a dedicated land line, I even have the ability and desire to work overnight so I can respond to any world time zone [I frequently ‘live’ on Iceland’s zone thanks to my European EVE Online corp … which I am baffled to find out we are now Goonswarm …] I have done online and phone customer service ranging from one of the early MMORPGs to working specifically as a forensic accountant, alarm service operations to insurance to temping answering phones and data entering responses. … I can’t work at home? All I freaking want to do is sit at a desk doing data entry or answering calls … sheesh. I could productive member of society your ass off!
That does not discount what I said. He is far more likely to have health care delays in the UK. That aside the US spends a greater percentage of GDP on R&D so he’s likely benefited from that research.
No, A state school is one subsidized by the state. That’s before additional subsidies spent on the disabled.
Capitalism rewards ability, not disability.
Capitalism doesn’t reward EVERYone for inventing the light bulb. We credit Edison for that.
Capitalism rewards exceptional ability, not exceptional disability.
BUT !!
Technology has added an asterisk.
Oscar Pistorius wouldn’t have had a prayer as a trophy winning runner 100 years ago.
But today, his prostheses impart what some competitors deem an unfair advantage.
With eye glasses, a person with less than 20:20 vision may be able to see better than 20:20.
How long will it be before a brain-injured citizen is fitted with a cybernetic prosthesis that imparts to the recipient such overwhelming intellectual advantage, that unaugmented candidates can’t compete?