Can we move beyond exploitation?

It seems that capitalism as we know it has reached a plateau. Not in growth, but in its capacity to enable social equity.

Capitalism as it exists today, and as it has always existed, depends on large groups of easily exploitable individuals. This is a problem because choice is the only value that can make capitalism an honorable system. so called “free” markets once depended on slaves and indentured servants. They now depend illegal immigrants and indentured students, as well as those who are too poor to say no. For the jobs that are too dirty or too low for most Americans, we are as dependent on minorities as we were before the civil war.

Our capitalist system is in essence, a feudal one. Illegal immigrants perform most of the hardest tasks, such as hand picking produce in the agricultural industry. Above them are most under educated black Americans and many undereducated white Americans who hold most of the minimum wage and near minimum wage jobs. Above these groups are college students and recent college graduates, who work as unpaid interns and are by and large indentured to student loan holders and, depending on the quality of their education, may never be able to pay off their loans. Building up upon all of these groups are large corporations that depend on workforces that work for free, work under, work at, or work near minimum wage. Such companies can effectively function like feudal communities, exploiting a peasant class (poor and without alternatives) for labor and spreading wealth between a class of nobles, i.e. shareholders, and royalty, i.e. CEO s and top executives. If we are to move beyond this ancient model, we must give those who provide the most rudimentary services truly have an alternative to the false choice between survival and exploitation. We most provide, REAL, opportunity for social mobility and not simply the illusion of it. People should not have to work for minimum wage, they should choose to.

Possible Solutions:

a) raising socialized minimum standards — this is the most obvious solution but not the most elegant. higher minimum standards provide competition for minimum wage labor. this solution would be more acceptable if we did not need manual labor at all. if the only work that is necessary is work that requires education, why not let people choose between basic survival and education?

b) employee ownership — regulating that companies give a certain % or entire ownership to workers is an interesting alternative to unionization. this model allows for the employees to maintain bargaining power for the terms of their employment (a key factor in successful capitalism) while also ensuring that the profit motive is maintained.

c) free online education access — if it is possible for anyone to self-educate for free, then it will be possible to say that anyone has access to upward mobility so long as they can find enough time to pursue it. if knowledge is universalized in an accessible way, then however bad an individual’s working conditions may be, there will be at least one way out of marginalization apart from death.

Some random principles of capitalism/free markets:

bargaining power — both sides of deals (consumer, producer; employer, employee; etc) have bargaining power. if bargaining power is shifted too much to either side a market of perfect competition can devolve into either a monopoly (feudalism) or stasis (communism).

profit — free markets depend on individuals behaving in self-interest. this can manifest itself in prices as well as employee benefits, shares, and dividends. when economic incentives align with social incentives, capitalism exists in harmony with society. However, when economic incentives jeopardize the common good, political intervention is often deemed necessary. areas where politics intervene with free markets include: subsidization, minimum wage, anti-trust law/pro-union law, contract law, consumer protection law, etc. These areas are areas of political debate. All attempt in one way or another to protect competition within markets.

Please comment if you have any other suggestions/criticisms. Also, feel free to add official definitions of any relevant terms.

ethics and economic distress

Many of us find ourselves at one point another with a choice between something that is affordable and something that ethical. I like to think that I would always choose whatever seems to be better for the world and/or society rather than what is best for my wallet. But what should one do when the ethical option is truly unaffordable? Is it better not to eat if one cannot purchase sustainable food? Is it better not to travel if one cannot purchase sustainable passage? Where do you draw the line on the little things that may collectively have a large impact?

(for me, it differs slightly by issue, but i think i would tend to forgo basic necessities if it seemed that my only options for acquiring them would cause sufficient harm)

On Poverty

We live in a world where some people profit and others do not. If we want to actualize equality we must become comfortable mixing socialism with capitalism. We must develop a standard, not for poverty, but for minimum wealth. Even if a person is unemployed and gives nothing (physical) to society, we must hold the conviction that it is better that a person be given the benefit of a doubt and the freedom to live in comfort and with the freedom to choose a type of life than for that person to be allowed to die or slip into suffering and servitude involuntarily. Whether we like to admit or not, at some point in our lives we are all completely dependent on others.

Now, at this point many of you will say two things: “There is not enough for everyone to have a fair and ample share of the world’s wealth” and “People must earn whatever it is that they have in order to justify their wealth.” I say, if there is not enough to go around that is a technical problem that we must come together to solve. That is not justification for classicism. I also say that none of us deserve anything and all of us deserve something. I am not willing to play God with people’s lives. I will make for damn sure that treat everybody else on this earth exactly how I would hope they would treat me were our positions reversed.

Nobody deserves to be poor and as long as people are poor, nobody deserves to be rich. I hope that you will join me in creating a world without poverty. I hope that you will help me solve the technical and technological problems that make it difficult for people to live comfortably and free. I hope you will also help me to change the perception that a person’s value is in a person’s productivity. People intrinsic worth just as our national forests do even if those people or forests lack any obvious utility.

At long last some of you will say, but if we end poverty who will plow the fields and unclog the toilets. At this I say, wow. What the crap. People shouldn’t have to be that specialized. People shouldn’t have to be like ants. People should be free. If we can’t create tools to plow the fields for us or unclog the toilets for us then to darn bad. If nobody wants to do it we shouldn’t make people do it my making it too hard for them to do anything else. We should find ways to make it so that nobody has to do it or we should do it ourselves or people should do it because they genuinely want to. They should want to because whatever they get from it in wealth or satisfaction is in addition to the plenty that they already enjoy not because they simply want to make a living.