In Michael Kinsley’s op-ed appearing in the Los Angeles Times on May 8, 2012, he writes:
“Being paid big bucks doesn’t mean that you’re worth it.”
Kinsley’s states author Edward Conard’s view, who not only believes in free-market capitalism but is willing to say publicly that what America needs is more inequality, not less.
“The argument is basically economist Adam Smith’s, carried to extremes: The invisible hand of free-market capitalism turns individual greed into prosperity for all. But Conard also shares Ayn Rand’s conviction that the successful businessman is a hero, the alpha male at his finest, while the rest of us are deadbeats and leeches. He says that Warren Buffett should ‘stop taking a victory lap’ for saying that the rich should pay more taxes. In Conard’s view, believe it or not, the middle class is better off paying more taxes so that people like Buffet can pay less and use their superior drive and brains to finance innovation that makes everybody richer.”
“Let’s accept the thesis that an individual is entitled to get rich if he or she makes a significant contribution to society. This still leaves you a long way from Conard’s belief that incomes should be more unequal, not less. There is a necessary distinction between riches gained through truly productive, socially beneficial activity, and riches from activities that just enrich the actor.”
“Why do people try to maximize their incomes? The poor person wants more money in order to eat. The middle-class person wants a better house or a new washing machine. Even a rich person may want an even better house or a servant to wash the clothes. But what more does a really, really rich person — worth, say, ‘most likely in the hundreds of millions’ — want that money can buy? What motivates him or her to go to work every morning, trying to accumulate even more? It’s not hard to come up with a few obvious psychological factors (competition, egocentrism, lack of imagination), but greed as classically understood is not one of them. The more someone has benefited from free-market economics, the less the theory behind free-market economics applies.”
The capitalism practiced today is what, for a long time, I have termed “Hoggism,” propelled by greed and the sheer love of power over others. “Hoggism” institutionalizes greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges). “Hoggism” is about the ability of greedy rich people to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital worker more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
Some conservative thinkers have acknowledged the damaging results of a laissez-faire ideology, which furthers the concentration of productive capital ownership. They are floundering in search of alternative thinking as they acknowledge the negative economic and social realities resulting from greed capitalism. This acknowledgment encompasses the realization that the troubling economic and social trends (global capitalism, free-trade doctrine, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs) caused by continued concentrated ownership of productive capital will threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.
When binary economics is understood, the current system is exposed as a system rigged to continually concentrate the ownership of capital in the 1 to 5 percent of the population. Also exposed are the moral implications of the current system, which is presently propelled by greed in our society. Democratic capitalism does not require people to be any better than they presently are, but it does enable our society to leverage both greed and generosity in a way that honestly recognizes and harnesses productive capital as the factor that exponentially produces the wealth in a technologically advanced society.
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
