Reply #4: "Markets" are not the same as capitalism

[starroute]

There are some good points in this piece -- but it seems to have the fatal defect of confusing free markets with capitalism.

Markets can be an excellent mechanism for allocating supply and demand -- but it is all too easy to rig the game. Corporations can artificially limit supply to increases prices or pump up demand to sell useless products. Monopolies can control sales and prices with even less effort.

Corporations also have a hundred other tricks to get out from under the imperatives of the market. They exploit workers, cheat consumers, blackmail local communities, and despoil the environment -- constantly taking without giving back. They have their fingers in everything from the media to the courts to make sure that they will never be held accountable and will always be able to continue to rig the system.

The real issue of socialism, as far as I can tell, is not whether you want to have the federal government run your local corner grocery but how to break the power of the corporations. I'm not convinced socialism is the best way to do that -- government is a good regulator, but it's not an ideal provider of goods and services -- but it's a good starting point for thinking about the problem.

Fundamentally, I think we have to break the power of capital itself -- to have a society in which there are certain things money cannot buy (elections, for starters) and in which the lack of money cannot be a barrier to either fulfilling essential human needs or participating in the political process.

Once we decide what our objectives are, we can then start to design a method for getting to that end point.