I do not trust a capitalist, democratic society any more than I would trust a communist, authoritarian one. Both suppress the best of humanity so that most people can be comfortable with their miniscule role in the cosmos, inflated by human pretense.
Hmmm. Communism always leads to authoritarian rule, but Corporatism (government run by capitalism) is also invariably authoritarian. There's more than one way to boil your dissenters in oil.
Democracy, human rights, and capitalism often come into conflict with each other. They are all necessary, and yet it is important to keep them within moderate and contexts.
I think it is, however, also important to make a distinction between capitalism and the free market. Capitalism is merely a system of using goods and services to generate wealth. It is practiced in every nation in the world, with varying levels of efficiency. The free market is what occurs when the means of production for goods and services are privately owned.
Consider Richard Nixon. Many of his policies involved utilizing the taxing, lawmaking and spending powers of the state to achieve progressive policy goals within the capitalist framework. This can be called "social democratic" if the base of support is principally the working class, unions, civil servants and academics and others interested in expanding state intervention, or "Progressive Conservatism" or "Business liberalism" if the goals are social and economic stability within a generally pro-business context. In practice, the programs of social democrats and business liberals can be indistinguishable. However, their power bases are different. Business Liberals will stop short of demonizing capitalism because they are themselves capitalists.
Going back even further, look at New York City. The giant metropolis would not have emerged if the Erie Canal had not made it the port by which goods entered the American Midwest. etc.....
Free market economics does not necessarily preclude centralized decision-making and publicly financed projects.
For a private organization to own and build the Erie Canal, it would have required a toll system and spending on security that was unnecessary if funded from the public purse. Thus, the Erie Canal, and most other transportation infrastructures, are best decided upon and funded by collective bodies.
The Erie Canal made the American Midwest possible in that it greatly reduced the cost and time it took to ship goods to the East Coast. Later came the land grants and railway subsidies. The 1950s Interstate highway system was the latest in a long series of transportation initiatives.
The interplay of private and public enterprise is so interlaced that you will not find a way to examine each on isolation.
A private trucking company that relies on the existence of the interstate highway system is but one example. There were virtually no long-haul trucking companies in the 1940s. By the 1960s they were ubiquitous.
So what of the laisez faire attitudes idealized by so many Adam Smith devotees? America's 'golden age' of unregulated business (1848-1890) also happened to involve perpetual warfare against the Indians and the existence of a slave economy in the southern US. It also glosses over the unjust seizure of Mexican lands (1846-1848). Shall we discuss child labor, cholera epidemics spurred by non-existent urban sanitation systems and all the other horrors of the 19th century that laisez faire fetishists love to ignore? Golden Age my ass. All that "free land" in the west involved a certain amount of state persuasion in the form of the army.
(Ever wonder why the Pentagon, the biggest welfare state on Earth, is never discussed for what it is?)
My point here is not to get wrapped up in the specifics of historical wrongs or the excesses of state intervention in areas it should have stayed out of, but rather to acknowledge that neither the free market nor state policy are panaceas. Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but lionizing private industry and demonizing the state (and vice versa) is pointless. Capitalism provides the economic engine, and the state must establish the rules of the game through the framework of law.
Railways killed off the canals. Highways and airlines killed off the passenger railways. Cue Elton John music from the Lion King.
This can also be acted out in a modern context. I do not care if my neighbor desires to paint his house purple, but if he wants to demolish it and put up a fifty story commercial skyscraper in a residential district, we've got a problem. The traffic will keep me awake at night, the construction will send debris all over my lawn, and the idiot kids from the ice cream parlor will probably key my car at some point. My neighbor has not caused me physical harm or damaged any of my property, but he has still violated a social contract. This should not be permitted, though Rand would argue there should be no restrictions on the use of private property or enterprise. Capitalism is an excellent system for generating wealth, but a horrible way to run a government. A truly unregulated economy only makes sense if you believe the meek have consented to be crushed by the strong.
