Economic options: Capitalism may be better than socialism, but is hardly ideal

Capitalism has dominated western thinking and significantly influenced a lot of the orient. Today nations like India, Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan and Japan are thriving capitalist states and their people are better off for it. Though China still has a socialist ideology, it has shifted to a form of socio-capitalism that has seen its economy boom, doing far more for its people than Maoism ever hoped to do.

If I had to choose between socialism and capitalism, I would have to choose the former because it is more efficient and it acknowledges the dignity of the individual and teh instruments of regulation predict better governance, accountability and social responsibility.

Socialism did little for the poor, except to reduce the rich to the lowest common denominator. Thus Orwellian swine, in sharing their collective wallow, remained happy as long as no extremists tried to elevate themselves above the excrement.

A recent case in point was Zambia. Under the leadership of liberal-minded president, the late Levy Mwanawasa, the country lifted itself out of the wallow created by decades of misrule. That brought tangible reform, but only a minority had the resources to capitalize on the opportunities so created, so some rose above the masses, creating an uncomfortable dissonance. Into that discomfort stepped an opportunist who almost stole power from the ruling party, thanks to a groundswell of support from the masses, just as Hitler once did the German economy signaled the need for a champion.

The point about Orwell’s Napoleon though, is not the hope that one would rise above the wallow to lead others to the light, but that the quagmire should so suppress the will of the people that those who do rise above it can use their advantages to oppress the downtrodden masses, leaving them all worse off than before. That, sadly reflects the worst consequences of socialism: an oligarchic monster that robbed people of their souls.

Capitalism has also had its share of victims. Something is wrong with a system that elevates 5% of the world to the 95 percentile of global wealth, whilst teeming billions suffer in poverty and oppression. Add to that the fact that the capitalist world has severely impaired the global environment, compounded by a rapidly multiplying residue that in so multiplying has devastatingly exploited the earth’s free natural resources.

There are other dark aspects to capitalism. It has been an underlying cause for all kinds of abuses – the wars of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan were largely sponsored by capitalist greed and oil rights. The fact that we have moved so slowly to alternative energy solutions, was largely because fossil fuels were still such a lucrative cash cow. The global roll-out of social and environmentally unfriendly products also disintegrated family life, aggravated social welfare dependency and escalated global organized crime.

Unfortunately the biggest concern now is that capitalism represents the greatest single impediment to global reform. In the face of paralyzing serious and survival threatening issues like pandemic diseases, the state of the environment, destabilization of the earth’s crust, global economic recession and a myriad other significant socio-political problems, the world will have no option by to change direction … which is seeding the emergence of new world order, and at the head of it, the darkest of all champions.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net