The events of the past decade have underscored one clear reality, corporations are overly greedy and must be checked by governments. Indeed, that is the sole purpose of good government when it comes to overseeing the marketplace— to prevent large corporations from preying on the citizens.
Individual action is rarely effective in checking what is often known as vulture capitalism or predatory capitalism. It takes the strong collective action of a central federal government to employ law and force in protecting citizens’ life, liberty, and prosperity.
The USA was born and developed through its infancy as a bastion of free market capitalism. The 20th century’s most well-known stalwart defense against capitalism’s economic inverse, socialism, was spearheaded by McCarthyism — the effort to root out communists and communist-leaning forces from the federal state. In the past fifty years, however, communism and socialism— the authoritarian-leaning economic models— have insidiously crept into American political economic thought and culture. The advance was apparently so slow that nobody noticed until it was too late. What was begun during Obama’s presidency has continued under the Biden junta.
This effort is nothing short of a communist revolution in slow motion. You would think that school-aged children and collegebound folks would study about free markets— Rothbard, Locke, Von Mises, Hayek. But no, that’s not what is typically read in high school social studies classes’ sections on economics. Most professors assign Marx, and not Das Kapital, that treatise on the nature of capital and the backbone of capitalist literature. US students study the Communist Manifesto, which is essentially an essay on revolutionary ideology and class warfare and a seminal text of the global communist movement.
There is a distinct difference between Marxian communism, the revolutionary ideology designed to act as a wedge to facilitate political change and true communism, the small-scale kind practiced in monastic cultures. One is very stable and harmonious, and the other leads directly to installing puppet regimes. That is precisely what happened in the USA in 2020— the Democrat Party, backed by the Nine Eyes countries and China, conspired to force an extralegal electoral victory for Joe Biden.
Many US citizens rejoiced without understanding the implications of the result. Any who had qualms on economic grounds about the future of free market capitalism in the USA was in the minority. Capitalism is deeply unpopular in the USA and worldwide. It is so unpopular in China that the CCP brands it “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Although China’s model is more state influenced than pure free market models, the point is important. Capitalism is not trendy. But why?
Why do people despise capitalism so much? This economic system is the one that is capable of bringing millions out of poverty. When an entrepreneur is able to freely build a business empire without being bound by necessary political favoritism and insularism that comes with socialist government administrations and bureaucracies, the entire society benefits, and many are lifted out of poverty. One would posit that capitalism is disliked simply because it is not widely understood. It takes a specific mindset to become a successful capitalist and to participate in the free market economy. If advanced economies like the USA do not tend their education systems and their cultures properly, the laziness and malaise that inevitably develops are perfect for breeding the kind of fat cat mentality that supports the socialists. Ask an American what capitalism actually is, and few would be able to tell you a clear, educated answer. Most have been trained to slander it.
The main primary cause of distrust of capitalism is that it is not practiced properly and intelligently. Whether by design or by destiny, most all capitalist models practiced around the world today lack governing systems to sufficiently redistribute capital and fail to protect citizens from vulture corporations with dynamic regulation. This is enlightened capitalism. The global economy’s structure has naturally permitted massive amounts of vultures, and enlightenment is nowhere to be seen.
Look no further than the recent COVID project for a clear example. The pharmaceutical industry gradually captured government regulatory agencies over a fifty-year period, starting with Nixon’s action protecting the pharma corps from downstream liability on vaccines and culminating in an engineered planetary plague that was essentially no more than a rebranding of the common cold but shook the foundations of the human civilization and unleashed a horde of petty tyrants. Pharma is an industry that sorely requires regulation. Some of the corporations there are notorious for nefarious business practices and have been sued cumulatively for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet those companies still exist and come back again with bigger, more devastating effects.
Enlightened capitalism dictates a much stronger government policy framework surrounding business development. Corporations are not permitted to engage in money-making endeavors that involve harming humans. A more extreme version extends government protections to animals as well. All human business ventures should aim to promote the well-being and prosperity of all humans. Anything else is prevented. Adopting such an economic model would end war and reorient human civilization away from internal violent conflict and towards nurturing planetary culture that looks outwards to the stars. All industries can reorient to discover ways for massive opportunities to profit without relying on the negatives that the vulture capitalist model continues to inflame.
This is not a purely free market ideal, but it would certainly set guide rails on human economic activity toward a course for a much healthier and happier planetary civilization.
