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.
