Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all Commentary: Capitalism will gladly sell the rope used t

[safeinOhio]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/grantham-wonders-if-marx-was-right-after-all-2012-02-29

Already, capitalism is proving that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were at least partially correct. They “looked forward to globalization and the supranational company because they argued it would make capitalism even more powerful, overreaching, and eventually reckless,” Grantham writes.
He says capitalism does almost everything better than any other economic system. It’s just that its two or three main flaws are potentially fatal and have gone largely unaddressed. A sustainable economic system, for instance, can’t be based on ever-increasing debt, corporations can’t be allowed to run governments and loot treasuries, and “growth at any cost” is a recipe for planetary suicide.
• Companies foolishly reward executives for taking on debt: “Total remuneration ... for senior officers ... rose as a percentage of the average worker’s pay from 40 times in Eisenhower’s era to over 600 times today with no indication of any general improvement in talent.”
• Economic theory ignores natural laws. It suffers an “absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources. ... Capitalism wants to eat into ... limited resources at an accelerating rate with the subtext that everyone on the planet has the right to live like the wasteful polluting developed countries do today.”

[Stuckinthebush]

1. Unfettered capitalism is dangerous

The master for capitalists is profit. Capitalists of the 21st century US stripe have convinced themselves that workers are "takers" and not the engine of capital. They will exploit these workers as much as the law will allow. Marx and Engles were correct in a great deal of their theoretical propositions. That is why their names had to be sullied and associated with evil (Marx at least).

We have become the Ferengi!

[Myrina]

2. There's 'capitalism' and there's 'capitalism' ...

... or should I say, the free market and the not-so-free-because-I-can-buy-legislation market.

Anytime the playing field is tilted toward one corporation or another by means of influencing tax policy, labor policy, land-use policy, anti-monopolies policy, etc etc ... that's no longer the real FREE MARKET.

[dash_bannon]

3. Capitalism isn't Democratic

Capitalism is one form of organizing an economy. It's sort of a Wild West approach that works in an inefficient manner. At best it can distribute low quality goods at a low price. (Think McDonald's hamburger.)

Left to it's own devices and unchecked by government regulation, capitalism devolves into monoplies and a concentration of wealth into the hands of the few.

Marx pointed out that whoever has the gold, makes the rules. Marx advocated for the workers to form unions, create labor parties, and take over government in that fashion.

The key flaw in capitalism and communism, is they fail to pay attention to microeconomics. Also, neither system concerns itself with the liberty of the individual.

Today's conservative conflates any government regulation with communism or socialism and treats it as an affront to his/her personal liberty and freedom.

They fail to understand Marx's critique of capitalism. They see such a thing as an attack on their individual rights. Marx's critique of capitalism was genius. To keep capitalism from self-destructing or consuming all resources for the benefit of the few we need government regulation to balance the rights of the worker and consumer against the desire for profits of the owners and producers of capital.

Bottom line: we need government to play referee, otherwise society devolves into a tyranny of the capitalist. The Bolsheviks and Soviets took communism to its other extreme, they created a bureaucratic tyranny of the majority.

Free markets don't work. Totally government controlled markets don't work. What works is something in the middle.