The nature of the beast

The most annoying thing about capitalism as we practice it today, other than the fact that people dying of preventable causes because they cannot pay for things being presented as the ideal situation, is how resistant to change it is.

"But Logan!" You say, being a strawman for the purposes of my argument, "Things change all the time! Look at fidget spinners! Uber! Bitcoin!"

Quiet you, these aren't really new, new products, even new lifestyle trends, don't change any of the basic elements of our economy, they are just new areas to commodify, Bitcoin perhaps could be a special case, but at the moment it's main attraction is how much dollars it can make, not how much it can buy, and even so exchanging one currency for another doesn't change the underlying system, I mean we aren't suddenly communist when we go to England and start using Euros, or the pound, or whatever they are doing now with Brexit.

I nearly got into an argument on Facebook the other day with someone about something related to this, there was a post made about how productivity is way up, but the workweek hasn't gone down. That thesis is only sort of true, but the person made the argument that this is because demand for everything has gone up as well, meaning we all still have to work just as hard to justify it.

This is stupid and he is stupid, supply and demand is the basis of any economy that still lives with scarcity, but it isn't and hasn't been the main driver in our economy for quite some time, or rather it hasn't been the only driver, like, in ECON 101 you talk about it, and then the professor also talks about how economies of nations are rather more complicated and you can't just reduce everything to supply and demand a much as you might like to. Which suggests to me that this fella went to class only the first day and then dropped out.

But even if he was right, if the economy worked exactly like that and no other way, then what is the proposed solution? I mean those of us who think it doesn't work like that have proposals ranging from raising the hourly wage, minimum basic income, shorter work weeks, to doing away with the system entirely and replacing it with some equally awful thing, the point is there are ideas, most supporters of the status quo won't admit they are monsters and presumably don't like the idea of people dying in the streets, but there never seems to be any ideas to prevent that outside of removing more regulations.

Which, you may recall, was sort of my point, capitalism doesn't change, it might be that it can't, as an economic theory or a philosophy it is at its heart morally bankrupt, with a foundation based not on people but on money, everything must be viewed through the lens of "how much money does it make" and anything that is "good" has to be something that makes money, and that makes more than the other options available. That is why it supports the rich, because they do drive the economy, at least the parts of the economy that capitalism thinks are the indicators of how well things are going, basically the stock market. You can't have populist capitalism, not without changing the nature of the beast entirely.

Systems aren't inherently evil, and capitalism is no exception, but they do encourage ways of thinking and acting that promote what is, for lack of a better work, evil, and it doesn't look like we can be trusted when the option to do harm is on the table if it would take more work to not do harm.