Charles Milliken: The true problem with capitalism
Those who have been faithful readers of my weekly jottings know I’ve recently spent nearly three months wandering about Spain. Among the many delights I’ve encountered were several excellent museums exhibiting Spanish civilization centuries before the Romans started to take over the place around 200 BCE. (Side note: “BCE” and “CE” have supplanted “BC” and “AD” lest the latter terms somehow offend non-Christians. Non-Christians apparently are easily offended. Those who worry about such things will have to think up another set of abbreviations, since “BCE” easily stands for “Before the Christian Era” and “CE” the Christian Era.) The museum exhibits make clear the assorted Spanish tribes were busy bartering and exchanging goods from time immemorial. Thousands of years before Karl Marx invented the term, proto-capitalism was alive and well on the Iberian peninsula.
With the passage of time, and the arrival of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians, capitalism became more prevalent as trading networks developed around the Mediterranean basin. Then the Romans showed up, practicing what is now termed “settler colonialism”, and their more sophisticated capitalist structures resulted in the creation of great wealth, the many remains of which are visible to this day. Unfortunately, the first great problem of capitalism reared its ugly head: the wealth was distributed unevenly. The clever, the lucky, the ambitious, the unscrupulous got rich. Those not so imbued became better off, but compared to the big winners, looked like losers. That problem is as current as the next election, what with “DEI” and similar political concerns.
Fast forward centuries, and more problems are added to the woes of capitalism. Marx talked about the exploitation of labor. More recently we talk about the incipient exhaustion of our precious natural resources. Carbon dioxide is being pumped into our atmosphere at ever-increasing rates in pursuit of profits, and it is only a matter of time until the earth and everyone in it is destroyed. (China pumps out more carbon dioxide than the capitalist West, but that’s a topic for another day.)
There is a litany of other woes. Factory closings ruin the economy of town after town as better returns are sought elsewhere. Capitalists, in furtherance of greed, use non-sustainable processes. Capitalists take advantage of women and minorities by under-paying them. And on and on.
Bad as all this is, it misses the key underlying problem with capitalism. From its very inception, the problem with capitalism was its practitioners seeking to make a buck by
doing or making something someone else was willing to pay for. No proto-capitalist gave any thought to whether or not the customer ought to want what he wanted, or the long-term consequences of making better spear points.
Thousands of years go by, and the core problem remains. It isn’t the capitalist who is the unwitting (or maybe witting) villain in the piece. It is the customer. Unless the customer wants what you are producing, you will cease producing it.
The best contemporary example of this is the illegal drug trade. Millions of people want opioids, cocaine, and assorted narcotics. Our government, fighting the war on drugs, goes after the suppliers, and not the customers. Suppliers go to jail. Customers need treatment and understanding for their addictions. Unwittingly, by making the supply chain illegal, the government also makes it a perfectly untrammeled capitalist system. Your friendly neighborhood drug dealer pays no taxes. There are no wage and hour laws. You can pay women and minorities any wage you darn well please. Retirement packages are not an expense and no drug dealer needs to concern himself with FDA regulations. If the customer buys a product laced with fentanyl, too bad.
Whether it's the war on drugs, or the war on gasoline, the problem is the same: the customer. If our progressive elites are to accomplish their utopian purposes, they have to control human nature. We have to be changed into ants in a hill, termites in a mound, or bees in a hive. Good luck with that.
— Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Charles Milliken: The true problem with capitalism
