Tag: economics

Capitalist Raider Culture or Why Geography Matters

Viking Reenactors - Iceland.

It’s easy to look at what happened between the so-called Western nations and the rest of the world and call it racism.  But what if the problem with white people isn’t racial, but geographic?

These speculations began while I was reading a Geography textbook from 1920 — that’s 100 years ago this year.  Reading about the land and resources of people around the world is interesting in and of itself — Vermont was a wood state, Maryland grew a lot of strawberries, that sort of thing.  But where it got especially interesting was when it came to the differences between peoples of foreign lands.  

Read More

Thoughts on Coronavirus Relief

Wu Shaoxiang Walking Wealth 2009

Natural Law

There’s been an emergence in Trump’s most recent rhetoric of belief in a natural law which states something like the following:

The rich deserve to get more because they have more.

The poor deserve to get less because they have less.

The rich stay rich; the poor stay poor.

This is the way things are supposed to be.

So simple.

But is it true?

Read More

The Limits Of Capitalism

1/22/2010

My argument, such as it is, is that Capitalism may be good at providing hefty benefits to the few, it’s no good at providing satisfying lives to the many.  And yet it dominates the lives of people worldwide, determining what work we will be able to do, how much we will be able to afford, what things will cost, and by extension, what kind of life we will be able to make for ourselves.  Capitalism is like Calvinism — it causes many things to be predestined.

As the moneys trickling down to the masses dwindles, we’re finding just how pervasive Capitalism is.  Everything we do is predicated on money and since the rules that govern money in America are predicated on Capitalism, we the people are forced to apply Capitalist principles in our lives, whether they really work for us or not.  Read More

Money Wants To Be Free

12/14/2008

Suppose we were to uncomplicate money.

I was reading a story in the Washington Post today about how the city of New York is cutting a daycare program for middle-class Alzheimer’s sufferers.   The program is badly needed by the families it serves, but the $1.2 million price tag and relatively low number of beneficiaries made it tempting to city government, and they cut the program.  All 12 centers will close by the end of the month.  Meanwhile, the hundreds of families they served are out of luck.

Once again, the question arises — why must we do without needed services provided by willing service providers just because of this arbitrary, made-up thing called money?  It’s true that when viewed through the usual lens of “because that’s the way capitalism works”, you can almost rationalize hurting real people to save a buck.  But when you jump up a level and look at the big picture, it just seems stupid that people go cold or hungry or without healthcare or education, because they weren’t blessed by birth or circumstance with a large enough share of the coin of the realm. Read More

What Is Capitalism?

Originally posted on iBrattleboro.com 10/28/2008

When I was ten, I borrowed a book from the School library called Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, which purported to explain the various economic systems to ten year olds.  My parents made me take it back because they said little children should not be reading about dangerous ideas like communism.  I showed them — in my senior year of high school, I wrote a term paper on The Communist Manifesto.

Despite this early interest in economics, I realized recently that I have almost no idea what capitalism really is, despite the fact that I use the word all the time.  So this essay is an effort to learn. Read More