Changing Capitalism

One of the random posts that went through my news feed with the new year was a nice little thing about what we'd remove from the world if we could change one thing. A fairly innocuous and unsurprising post for this time of year, all things considered... except for some of the answers, of course.

A number of people used it as a nice way to talk about things that were holding them back and things they'd like to do differently in the future. However, a number of people also used it to make statements about some significant things they'd like to remove from the world - greed, capitalism, money, or oil were all named as things by some of them.

Which immediately attracted my attention, because I actually don't agree with the notion at all, particularly as it applies to the specific resources which are often sources of conflict.

Here's the thing: Many of these things, particularly the actual resources, have provided great benefits. There are entire regions of the world that would not be easily habitable without gas-fired heating and electrical systems, for example. Capitalism itself turns out to be an okay way to allocate resources and a better way to self-correct that allocation when something isn't useful or desired than most other economic systems.

The caveat, of course, is that the above doesn't mean these things are an unalloyed good. Over-committing to one specific solution or helpful resource can put us in a bad situation when it comes time to change to a better one or try to address problems with what we have, for example. And while there are a lot of ways in which capitalism is self-correcting, there are a lot of circumstances in which it isn't (monopolies and limited definitions of value being the most prominent examples to me); those situations can't be fixed by purely capitalist solutions. That would be why the vast majority of successful societies have some form of mixed economy instead of pure capitalism, and believing our economic and societal structures are flawless and shouldn't be (or even can't be) improved further seems like unjustified confidence verging on stupidity to me.

But we should be aware of what we've already got and do the best we can to ensure our changes are actually improvements. That's not easy to do (or to agree on), but it's worth the effort.