I rather derailed this thread with an exasperated reply to Sam Stone’s sad libertarian rant on the blessings of free-market capitalism, and figured I should give him the opportunity to respond in a more appropriate venue, which is this thread.
I’m distilling three major contentions from Sam’s post for my argumentative purposes here:
[ol]
[li] Free-market capitalism (but not, apparently, contemporary American capitalism?) would provide all with equality of opportunity, leaving everybody free to prosper according to the extent of their talent, skills, and work ethic.[/li][li] Capitalism does not require that anybody be poor (although, see the thread above, maybe it does, but only 20%).[/li][li] The market solves all questions ideally: there is no better tool to set prices, wages, or indeed (necessarily) anything that cannot be as easily quantified, such as the problem of ecological pollution.[/li][/ol]
I may be off base with my summaries, so this might be the first bone of contention. I’ll be happy to be correct, if the corrections substantially alter the position I’ve sketched; I’m also happy with emendations, if I missed a major contention. I’m also assuming that Sam would prefer to speak of ideal free markets when making these claims, rather than the markets that exist. I will do so below.
My reply to these points will be twofold, I think. First, I should outline why I think those points are mistaken on their own, which is to say, even assuming that capitalism is the only possible system: that this is not, in fact, how capitalism works. And I’ll have a more fundamental critique to follow this with.
So, in a nutshell:
[ol]
[li] The crux of the matter here is, of course, the idea of “opportunity.” I offered, in the other thread, the example of the Monopoly board. Here’s equal opportunity (with the “luck” of getting to be the first to throw the dice): the rules apply equally to everybody. But, of course, if the means of acquiring anything are distributed unevenly from the start (as they are in the real world), there is no real equal opportunity. Monopoly reduces the variable to one: money. But in the real world, we have many more variables, of which money is just one: sex and gender, race, class, geographical location, religious upbringing, etc., etc., are all involved. These produce the conditions for participation in a market: the free market provides equality of opportunity to participants in the market, but on a pre-structured playing field. Even the ideally free market—in which nothing whatsoever regulates the flow of goods, services, and money—does not offer equality of opportunity, because opportunity is not merely access to it. The idea that it is only your own set of skills and work ethic that determines your success is a chimera that supports the status quo by permitting the casual dismissal of poor people as lazy and stupid, rather than forcing us to consider the structural deficits of the system at large[/li][li] Yes, capitalism does require that some people be poor. It is built on the exploitation of those who do not own the means of production so that the capitalist can amass profit. Profit is achieved through the sale of goods and services for more money than went into their production. But where does the extra money come from that allows anybody to buy that finished product? Quite simply, it comes from not paying those who labor more than is absolutely necessary, up to and including nothing (slavery)—from exploitation, in other words. Exploitation is by far the more useful word, too, because poor is relative: neither you nor I, no matter how much we own, are poor, compared to the virtual slave laborers in China’s and Bangladesh’s clothing and electronics industries; but we are all exploited (if wage workers), because we are not being paid for the value we impart to a product, but simply according to the minimum possible level. But even for any half-way sensible definition of poor, capitalism requires (will necessary result in) poverty, because the rate of capital accumulation goes up with the amount of capital you have, while the rate of total capital doesn’t follow it: in other words, more and more money must be in the hands of fewer and fewer people—which results in poverty for those at the bottom.[/li][li] The market just has not been shown to do any of those things, in fact, it has been shown to do the complete opposite in home mortgages, in tulip prices, in stock prices (at least half a dozen times in the last 100 years): the evidence for which facts is the resultant economic crashes, which I doubt anybody will deny. Nor can the market set “fair” wages, because there is no equitable distribution of power among those disputing “fairness”: if I need work to live, I may not be able to wait for a better offer; but if you don’t need ME in particular, YOU can wait. If it were up to the free market, we’d still be having slavery.[/li][/ol]
Finally, and very briefly (and I realize my opening gambit here is in many way unsatisfactory): the more fundamental problem is that none of this answers the question: what is the free market for? I firmly believe that the goal of human activity should be the achievement of maximum emancipation, security, justice, and happiness for all. The free market ideology would have a little bit of these things for those who, by the laws of the free market, have proven themselves “worthy”. There’s a fundamental moral disconnect here between free-marketers who see failure on the free market as sufficient to denounce whole human beings and those who think that the free market should not determine by economic success who should be able to live their life to the fullest.
