Eric Kierans and Walter Stewart wrote some 25 years ago about how the modern capitalist system has become inverted from what it used to be, in that it now favours producers far more than consumers. They also talked about how some companies accumulate so much power and wealth that they almost become a law unto themselves, getting lawmakers to pass legislation and policies that benefit them specifically, frequently cutting out competition while trying to force open other countries' markets. The increasing tendency among some businesspeople to focus on short-term profits over long term gain was not helping things, either.
They did all this while also talking about the values of trade and capitalism, and denouncing the idea of nationalizing everything.
Now, look at what
one of America's wealthiest entrepreneurs is saying:$1:
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind...But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
...
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
...
It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics...I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
...
Dear 1%ers, many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter.
This reminds me of what Kierans and Stewart were talking about when they mention how Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand operating within a set of ethical and moral guidelines, and how the state plays an essential role in providing that ethical and moral framework, and ensuring that everyone has, inasmuch as possible, at least some form of social support.
This ties into
something I've mentioned before on this site, namely how private enterprise and individual gain can complement the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses of government effort, and vice versa. As with so many other issues in Canada, much of our current political dialogue implies that we're in this zero-sum game where apparently all we can have is either a highly-taxed welfare state or a hard-nosed laissez-faire one. That is nonsense, of course-
given how combining them has been one of the keys to Canada's success as a society. Some inequality is always going to exist, but government action can help act as a cushion to mitigate its worst manifestations. There's a reason it's called the social "safety net" after all.
As to how we break out of that zero-sum game...again, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it?
CKA Uber 
