Flipping through the stations on my satellite radio the other morning, I heard those three words uttered by a talk show guest. With great earnestness, and more than a tinge of anger.
His “logic?”
Apparently, when unemployment gets too low, capitalist pigs like the Wall Street Journal start to worry, because too-low unemployment causes wages to rise, even without the assistance of labor unions. Can’t have that, apparently, because it’s bad for business.
Utter poppycock.
Not the part about the wage-inflationary pressure caused by full employment, but the “worry because…” part. Wage-inflationary pressure can be worrisome because it can slow an economy – and, very non-capitalistically, because our money supply is not free market. It is actively managed by quasi-governmental types, who use the unemployment rate as one of their metrics for toying with the money supply. Whether you think that the Fed’s role as an active manager of the money supply, and by extension, the economy, is a good thing or not, it remains that evil, greedy, capitalistic bastards aren’t cheering on the continued impoverishment of the masses.
Capitalism has done more, BY FAR, to improve the lives and well-being of the poor than any other system ever conceived. Capitalism actually benefits from increasing wealth. The more disposable income people have, the more they can spend on “luxuries,” such as craft beer, the arts, artisanal cheese, theme parks, electric cars, designer clothing, consumer electronics, gluten-free artisanal mead, designer footwear, and Cronuts. And, as the poor’s lot is improved, the capitalists benefit as well. It’s the win-win of free market economics.
Not-capitalism, on the other hand, is directly responsible for the worst human miseries and the most atrocious takings of lives and livelihoods, throughout all of written history. Moreso, scratch just below the surface of most purported “failures of capitalism” and you’ll find a distortion, government meddling, or statist intervention that’s the real culprit. It is the non-capitalists, i.e. the socialists, fascists, communists, dictators, oligarchs, and other “take from others by force” folks who engage in win-lose economics, in the idea that wealth is zero-sum, and that the improvement of one’s lot in life can only come by reducing another’s.
The fact that we have people peddling garbage such as “capitalism needs poverty” speaks of the mess that our education system has become.
Instead of the farcical “capitalism needs poverty” soundbite, I’d recommend “socialism breeds poverty.” It’s correct.
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