WHEN someone like Daniel McBride (Letters, April 17) describes capitalism in terms of nothing being forced, free-market enterprise, and uses trickle down of wealth to justify its existence, then I recognise someone who who has failed to question the textbook description he believes rather than the reality of life.
By it’s very nature of the collection of wealth and its associated power, everything in capitalism is forced. It is a system dependent on inequity to maintain itself.
With its yawing chasm between rich and poor, and the fact that 2% own 90% of the wealth, the force applied by rich to poor is implicit, the very core of how the system exists.
READ MORE: Capitalism has brought benefits to the rich and poor alike
And so what if the so-called trickle down grants us a higher standard of poverty for most?
It is still little more than the scraps thrown from the table by a system that sees food, clothing and even clean water as a luxury for many in the third world, whose poor fate in life was to be born into a country being exploited by wealthy capitalists’ “investment”; scant trickle down there.
Even in our sixth-biggest economy in the world we have missionaries working among us, helping to alleviate our poor, we have waged workers who need food banks, many of our children go to school hungry, and our welfare and health systems are underfunded while we tolerate the obscenity of maintaining weapons of mass destruction, ostensibly to protect our branch of the capitalist system, and the wealth of our capitalists, against others who might want to seize it.
The Daniel McBrides of the world may congratulate themselves on understanding what capitalism says it is and what it does. He may view the real world from the top down and accept and be happy about his position in it.
Can I suggest he looks at real life from the bottom up, see the reality of actual poverty of wealth and health, and recognise the inequality of the majority of those everyday human transactions, which are forced by those who have financial power and who
use that power to exploit the labour of the many and the world’s resources for the sole purpose of accumulation of even more wealth and power?
And capitalism works? Really?
Perhaps Daniel McBride should realise that it’s only the fettering of so-called free enterprise capitalism through regulation that keeps the lid on the tinderbox.
Jim Taylor
Edinburgh
DANIEL McBride’s letter is a simplistic paean to the free market. The fact that Mr McBride’s source material is a dictionary definition of a complex set of interconnected practices and philosophies is in itself a giveaway.
I suggest that he consider the foundation and philosophy of the Mont Pelerin Society. Established in 1947, it was the beginning of what we now think of as neoliberalism or the unrestricted free market. This is the economic programme which David Harvey notes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism has created a huge movement of wealth to the top 0.1% of the population. It was the progenitor of the era of capitalism we are now in, an era which George Monbiot colourfully calls the age of plutocracy’s boot boys.
Global capitalism in its present state is a system by which right-wing politicians and policy-makers seem to believe they can free themselves and their wealthy chums from economic constraints faced by the majority of the population. And that is not even to touch on the anti-democratic instincts of many of these powerful elites.
So, no, I find little to agree with in Mr McBride’s analysis.
Archie Love
via email
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