Capitalism and Improving the Quality of YOUR Life

I’m absolutely sure that when you mention that you’re struggling to earn an adequate living and that you think the system is rigged, you were met with some of the following comments.

“Communism is a failed system.”
“Capitalism is the best system we’ve got.”
“Big Governments don’t work.”

None of these comments address the basic issue which is that the quality of life of your life sucks, and far from having time to pursue happiness, you’re struggling to determine if you should join the happy throng of food stamp receivers for that extra $8 per month you didn’t work for.

So let’s look at this, find out why capitalism used to be a pretty good system for our grandparents and our parents and see if we can fix it up or if we need another system. After all, all of us want a good quality of life, not just the top 5%.

When Capitalism Produced Wealth with Hard Work and Smart Work

• Your grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents lived in a time when there were still many resources that had not yet been exploited. They were there for the taking. For instance, just a mere three or four generations ago, Americans could move to a place where there were no people living, stake a claim for land, not pay for it, register it, and it was theirs! That was the advantage for all people of the new world. There was land, minerals, clean water, and little government. That was the great thing about the new world. If someone stood in the way, you could just pick up a gun and shoot him.


• At the end of WWII, Americans were in a good position to import the brains of Europe to America. Einstein had been kicked out of Germany (my late father was at the same university he attended and also went to his farewell speech at the main Berlin synagogue) and people like Werner von Braun who were at the helm of rocket research in Germany were brought to the States.  The resulting boom in technology was seen as a result of diversity. Not really. The occasional imported brain is hardly proof of diversity. In fact, subsequent research has shown that creativity is the result of much leisure and a good deal of discretionary income. That’s when people sit down to create...


• At the end of WWII, America was given the Reserve Currency. This meant that America could set the foreign exchange rate, so, to give a very simplistic explanation, if America wanted to pay one penny for China’s equivalent of $1, she could. This meant that, for a very long time, America was importing very cheap goods because she was manipulating the currency.


• The strength of the unions was at an all time high. This ensured that all people were not only paid a livable wage but a wage where they had discretionary income. This allowed them to educate their kids and flourish. The baby boomers were the first generation that received the benefits of their parent’s hard work in getting the entrepreneurial class to divert some of their excessive profits (remember the robber barons) to the working class. This worked just great! Unfortunately, the baby boomers, not having suffered the terrible consequences of ever being underpaid, promptly became the same old entrepreneurial class, got rid of their forefathers’ hard work in limiting entrepreneurial profits, and, well, um, the strength of the unions is now at the bottom of the ant heap.


• Somewhere during the first half of the 20th century, although there was progress in terms of technology (electricity, cars, phones, etc.), it wasn’t the type that would eliminate jobs. In fact, those creations actually increased jobs. Today, any new technology that comes along eliminates jobs. While there is a lot of attention on American jobs being exported to China, the fact is that if you look at typist pools and secretarial positions, word processing eliminated them. In short, a word processing clerk could do in a day what a pool of typists previously took a week to do. In other words, all those jobs were eliminated. And that is something that is not going to change.


• There were more jobs than people. Now there are more people than jobs. In those days, because entrepreneurs needed people, if employees were treated badly, they simply walked out and found another job around the corner. Today, employees have to bend over backwards, squat upside down, eat shit for breakfast, and kill themselves with loathing while they work for the big bucks that their bosses pocket. In other words, employees either work for tuppence or they starve. There aren’t any more jobs.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/q/quality_of_life.asp

How Capitalism Increases Quality of Your Life

Capitalism is very good at exploiting resources by rewarding people who exploit those resources. When resources run out, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible to exploit resources. In other words, the reason for the earlier success of capitalism was that there were a lot of resources to exploit; there aren’t any more. When the playing fields are level and everybody is allowed to use the available resources, everybody has a good quality of life.

There are many different kinds of resources:

• Material resources like mineral wealth, oil, fertile land, wood, and water. There isn’t so much of this left anymore.


• Intellectual resources that come from people who are particularly talented in this. According to DNA, intelligence is 100% genetic. That said, virtually any doctorate can be achieved with average intelligence, and average human intelligence is more than intelligent enough for most creative endeavours. The ones that change the direction of humankind - like electricity, phones, computers, etc. are, unfortunately, limited to very few. It’s daft to put that sort of pressure on the majority of people and say that they’re just as capable. They’re not. As it becomes more accepted that we are our DNA, people will begin to accept that we all have different strengths and every single one of our strengths are totally necessary for the survival of all.


• Skills resources are the result of training and education. Unfortunately, the profit motive has got in the way of training people well. The government (and this happens in most countries) wants to train people with low level skills to have high level skills. They are willing to pay educators. What happens is that ‘educators’ do a very poor job and leave people with training that is substandard. I’ve attended several of these courses in my life time and I am appalled! Not a single one of them allowed me to move up a level. They were simply a means of creating profit for the entrepreneurial class. In addition to this, 85% of university graduates do not use their training in their jobs. This indicates that a) their degree wasn’t required for the job and could have been done by anyone b) that the training offered by universities, for the most part, doesn’t in any way contribute to the skill level of the vast majority.


• Talent is a resource. Again, it is in the hands of the few and is entirely the result of DNA. Sure, one can hone talent, but without the talent to hone, there is no way that a midget is going to become a baseball star and a man born dumb (without a voice) is going to become another Pavarotti.


• Community is another resource. Unfortunately, community has all but vanished in modern big cities. Whereas before, small communities might have gotten together to build a town hall for use by all, many of these tasks have now become the sort that is left to elected authorities who are more interested in lining their own pockets and egos.

http://jainvish.blogspot.com/2011/12/thank-you-sir.html

What are the Issues?
Here’s the thing. Many of these resources are no longer with us. They’ve either been used up or there are too few of them for everybody to have some of them.

Here are the issues:

• As we use machines to take away more and more jobs, there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs. Everybody is not Einstein and everybody is not Pavarotti. So not everybody can use intellect and talent as resources. So the reality is there are too few jobs for too many people. If the only way people can earn is through jobs, then virtually everybody on this planet is screwed. More to the point, if capitalism only works because there are resources to exploit, and if resources run out, or if there are only sufficient resources for a certain number of people, how is quality of life for everybody possible under capitalism?


• There has always been that class of people who believe in survival of the fittest. They believe that because they are the strongest, the cleverest, the whatever-est, that they are entitled to have what they take/earn/want. Unfortunately, humanity is a social species and this is not the way everybody sees it. This is why there have always been class wars at points when the imbalance between the haves and have-nots becomes too great.

http://yaelol.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/177-how-soft-is-your-standard-of-living/

Can We All Have Quality of Life?
I think so but it’s probably not going to happen unless there is a massive movement by the people to get away from their natural inclination to follow authority for authority’s sake. It means that the people need to start looking at cold hard logic and begin to work out for themselves what works for everybody, and then they have to be strong enough to implement it.

No, I don’t have the answers, but I thought you might like to look at why your quality of life under capitalism isn’t the same as the way it used to be for your forefathers. :)