Capitalism Also Can Give Away Free Widgets

Capitalism is simply the effort to increase wealth. Sometimes one may increase wealth by giving away items for free. That is a corrollary of the idea that sometimes increasing social or environmental capital empirically-for-others may also increase one's own standard of living and hence wealth indirectly.

Adam Smith was not a moron; he sought to increase wealth for himself and for others. The increase of wealth was his goal rather than an economic method as an end in itself. One may increase personal standard of living indirectly-like scoring a basket with a bank shot rather than just stuffing the ball in a hoop.

It would be tough to persuade people that Adam Smith and Karl Marx were equally capitalists yet they were. Each sought to increase capital or wealth. Smith had a particular method for that and Marx had a particular method for that yet each had the goal of increasing personal wealth. Marx believed his best chance to increase personal wealth and capital for the majority was through collectivism and state ownership of production-quaint notions today. That was a kind of mercantilism or command economy approach that negated free market economics.

Smith was all for free market economics yet argued that it was good for society over-all; a similar goal of Marx; they had different ideas about how to get the most wealth to the greatest number of citizens most efficiently. It is better though to be a middle class individual in a rich society with liberty for all and a healthy environment than a rich man in a desertified, polluted world with poverty, mass social degradation, misery and worse technology than the preferred economy. Many modern American politicians have trouble with that. They would rather be captain on the Titanic than a non-commissioned officer on the Star Ship Enterprise.

Neither Smith or Marx were for pure personal egoism as the sole expression of capitalism. Pure egoism and exclusive self interest to the negation of that of others is often taken today to be the best way for capitalism to actualize. The philosophy of personal egoism supports tyranny. Smith and Marx were in opposition to tyranny.

In true free market economics privacy is essential. Privacy is required for freedom to pursue the acquisition of wealth and set one's own values for what wealth is-even if it is the true jewels of spirit in the Lord Jesus Christ. To violate sovereign privacy to regulate own's own affairs is to negate individual enterprise and retard the social and political economy as well.

Corporations are collectives working to increase capital, sometimes with unequal distribution of wealth. They are cooperatives or collectives with diverse forms of compensation for participation. Marx believed business in his day impoverished the workers and increased wealth only for the owners and some managers.

In the cold war political theorists argued that corporations also increased the standard of living for workers validating therein the idea that capitalism may be a tool for increasing the wealth of society rather than strictly individuals and/or plutocrats.

If capitalism is the effort to increase personal capital in a social environment, it may be useful to distribute free widgets to increase social intelligence that in turn increases social capital or wealth. John F. Kennedy famously said that when the tide comes in all of the ships in the harbor rise. The theoretical value of increasing social wealth by provisioning society with better tools of intelligence, creativity and production that will make the economic tide rise in the nation-harbor can increase personal capital as empirical wealth has increased.

Consider an abstract example; A man has conserved 1000 pounds of salt in some economy that has no salt. Cheese prices have sky-rocketed because cheese makers have no salt to make cheese with. The man with salt is a social pariah and none would buy his salt if their lives depended on it, if they knew he had salt to sell. Cheese makers don't really care if their cheese sells for $100 a pound ostensibly because of the high price of imported salt. Yet the pariah with the salt loves cheese and can't afford to buy it. So the salt miser distributes free salt to cheese makers from his hidden supply that he makes himself, slowly, with a secret process for a song, and the price of cheese drops to $1 dollar a pound as the cheesemaker's production costs have dropped to minimum and competition for market share has compelled selling cheapest cheese to stay in business and survive cheese-wars for market share. It is plain that the distribution of free salt increased the capital of the salt miser-even if indirectly-through savings on cheese purchased for his own consumption, and the ambiance of being able to afford quality sharp cheddar cheese instead of none at all.

Free trade pacts that dump global power to plutocrats are not a good way to increase social wealth, yet are instead insidious paths to increase power and wealth of plutocrats. That is an authoritarian sort of direction against the conservation and increase of national social and environmental wealth and well-being.

Indirectly that recession of capital intelligence and reason would bring foreign nations to pursue incorrect and self-destructive economic methods that are environmental and socially retardants destructive of each.