Too often, Capitalism is portrayed by the Left as being a selfish economic philosophy. Greed figures heavily into their diatribes as well. After all, if Socialism and Communism is your goal, why would anyone want to tell the truth about the system you want destroyed?
You wouldn’t, and we all know that the first tactic is to first demonize your enemy and then “soft lens” your own preferences.
In the Op-Ed by Joseph Mirzoeff entitled “Looks like COVID is Almost Over!” Commenter Dan McGuire had a response that goes well beyond a discussion of COVID and what/who has screwed things up and how Capitalism (if the interference from Government was removed, I’d wager) has a better philosophical foundation (emphasis mine):
Excellent points up to your last paragraph. It isn’t just incompetence, it’s self-interest. Just like anyone else, bureaucracies act on self -interest, which means empire building; extending the problem for which they are the “solution”, but never actually fixing it. This is known as public choice theory and it got James Buchanan the economics Nobel prize in 1986. For example, the fact that the Afghanistan “war” went on for twenty years shows how much the defense department has become a pure bureaucracy.
The genius of capitalism is that in the private sector your self-interest in getting my cash leads you to do good things for me so I’ll hand it over. It’s win-win. You would think that in this case that would carry over to the medical profession which is still theoretically private, but the connection between curing patients and getting paid has almost been totally severed,. This is particularly true in hospitals with the incentives they have during covid.
It’s the phrase “self-interest” that is the most important here and is often denigrated by the Left as “selfish.” However, they never acknowledge that while Capitalists do it for money, the Left’s “self-interest” is always about Power – they just hide it as “sharing” or re-distributing $$$ to help the poor and oppressed.
Sorry, they flat-out lie.
Sure, socialists like AOC love having the money to wear expensive gowns that say “Tax the Rich” while going to a $30,000 per ticket event with no recognition of self-irony. Bernie Sanders, too, “covers up” for no longer berating “millionaires and billionaires” since becoming one ala Capitalism through his celebrityhood after authoring a best-selling book that made him a millionaire with three homes.
Self-interest – there’s nothing wrong with acting that way. Who in their right mind wishes to be worse off than they are now or advocate for themselves for bad outcomes? That’s simply perverse as most people do act to better themselves, better their standing in society, and provide a better life for themselves.
And Dan is right, and I’ve said it for years – government bureaucracies do the same thing. They are constantly looking to extend what they do and whatever control over others they can to justify expanding their budgets. Why?
To appear to be relevant. To validate their existence. Empires? Indeed.
Yet Capitalism depends on one thing that Dan put well: if you aren’t offering a higher value product than the money I have in my pocket, it will stay in my pocket. If you can’t convince me that I will be better off with your product, be it a need or a want to be satisfied, you can keep that product.
If you aren’t serving me, in some way, the deal doesn’t happen.
Because it is Voluntary.
And as we are seeing, dangerously so, Government isn’t voluntary at all. And Socialism and Communism are economic systems that depend on economics to be run through bureaucrats first. THEIR self-interest comes before yours.
If they even were to bother what your interests are.
