The Evidence Keeps Pouring In: Capitalism Just Isn’t Working
Published on
Monday, August 24, 2015
by Common Dreams

Paul Buchheit
62 Comments

(Photo: Jonny White/cc/flickr)

To followers of Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan, and to all the business
people who despise government, ‘community’ is a form of ‘communism.’
Even taking the train is too communal for them. Americans have been
led to believe that only individuals matter, that every person should
fend for him/herself, that “winner-take-all” is the ultimate goal,
and that the winners have no responsibility to others.

To the capitalist, everything is a potential market. Education,
health care, even the right to water. But with every market failure
it becomes more clear that basic human rights can’t be bought and
sold like cars and cell phones. The pursuit of profit, when essential
needs are part of the product, means that not everyone will be able
to pay the price. Some will be denied those essential needs.

Common Dreams needs you today!

Global Failures

Capitalism hasn’t been able to control runaway global inequality. For
every $1.00 owned by the world’s richest 1% in 2011, they now own
$1.27. They own almost half the world’s wealth. Just 70 of them own
as much as 3.5 billion people.

Capitalism has not been able — or willing — to control the “race to
the bottom” caused by “free trade,” as mid-level jobs continue to be
transferred to low-wage countries.

Nor has capitalism been able to control global environmental
degradation, with trillions in subsidies going to polluters that
don’t even pay their taxes, and with corporations ignoring any
semblance of social responsibility as they seek ways to profit from
global warming.

Job Creation Failures I

With or without globalization, middle-class jobs are disappearing,
even higher-end positions in financial analysis, medical diagnosis,
legal assistance, and journalism. Artificial intelligence is making
this happen. Millions of Americans have had a role in the great
American productivity behind this technological takeover, but
capitalism allows only an elite few of us to reap the disproportional
profits.

Reports of job recovery are based on low-income jobs, many of them
part-time. Layoffs are cutting into the military and technology.
Gallup discounted Wall Street’s job-creating ability. As noted by
former Wall Street Journal Associate Editor Paul Craig Roberts, the
US rate of unemployment is 23 percent when long-term discouraged
job-seekers are included. That’s close to the unemployment rate of
the Great Depression.

Job Creation Failures II

Closely related to employment woes is the collapse of corporate
investment in new product R&D, from 40 cents per dollar in the 1970s
to 10 cents now. CEOs are choosing instead to spend almost all of
their profits on buybacks and dividends to enrich investors.

Health Care Failures

The capitalist profit motive allows the cost of a hepatitis pill that
costs $10 in Egypt to sell for $1,000 in the United States, and the
cost of a blood test to range from $10 to $10,000 in two California
hospitals (a 100,000% markup at the second hospital).

Patent abuse is one of the factors making this possible.
Pharmaceutical companies can tweak a drug with a minor change to
create a “brand new” drug with a new patent.

Another health-related scam that affects most of us is bottled water.
According to Food & Water Watch, about half of it is filtered tap
water with fancy names, as evidenced in one case by an actual “tap
water” label on a company’s product. Yet with the demise of community
water fountains, and the barrage of advertising for “safe and pure”
drinking water, unsuspecting Americans pay dearly: for the price we
pay for a bottle of water we would be able to fill up that bottle a
thousand times with tap water.

Housing Failures

Because of the “invisible hand” of the free market, in just 35 years
the investment wealth of the super-rich has gone from 15% of
middle-class housing to almost 200% of middle-class housing.

Education Failures

A remarkable story of privatization failure is told in the story of
charter schools in Florida, where Jeb Bush still holds dear to his
delusions of free-market educational success.

That’s just one example. In general, charters are riddled with fraud
and identified with a lack of transparency that leads to even more
fraud. Since 2001 nearly 2,500 charter schools have been forced to
close their doors, leaving over a quarter-million schoolchildren
between one bad business decision and the next. A report from PR
Watch summarizes the billions of dollars spent on charters without
accountability to the public.

Disposable Americans

Chris Hedges wrote: “Human life is of no concern to corporate
capitalists. The suffering of the Greeks, like the suffering of
ordinary Americans, is very good for the profit margins of financial
institutions such as Goldman Sachs.”

People become meaningless in a successful capitalist system.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut
Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational
websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and
the editor and main author of “American Wars: Illusions and
Realities” (Clarity Press). He can be reached at
paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.