Friday, September 25, 2009
A Failure Of Imagination
I'm watching Real Time with Bill Maher tonight and can't believe what I'm hearing. He's talking to Michael Moore about his new movie and he says that if we don't have capitalism the only other option is communism. In other words, we either keep what we have now or we switch to what they had in the old Soviet Union. Are you serious? Is this the best we can come up with in the 21st century? Two equally bad alternatives?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Like your very perceptive wine reviews, but not your politics. That's okay. You might think the same about me.
ReplyDeleteBut really, honestly, between two people of good will, before you say that capitalism and Soviet communism are "equally bad," I think you should ask yourself, or maybe ask Solzhenitsyn, what would have happened to you if you had said that very same thing "in the old Soviet Union."
Here in the evil Running Dog Capitalist West, you are allow to mouth off to your heart's content, without worrying for a half a second about getting disappeared for years into a gulag. So although Capitalism, being a human system, ain't perfect, your own very free speech shows that capitalism is not contrary to free speech. In fact, capitalist economic systems function most successfully when there is a free exchange of information both in the economic marketplace and in the marketplace of ideas, where individuals are allowed, for the most part, to make their own choices in either place about what they buy and what they offer for others to buy. By contrast, every communist regime has had to silence speech and limit the free exchange of information, as China's confrontation with Google provides the most prominent current example.
I amvery glad that you are free to critique capitalism, because it needs careful criticism to correct its weaknesses and because the very your existence of your critique shows that capitalism does not silence its critics, but it would be better if your critique were more precise rather than to say, very wrongly, that capitalism and communism are "equally bad alternatives." (I also notice that you do not come up with alternative.)
I think both Solzhenitsyn and you are confusing two unrelated ideas, like most people. Capitalism and communism are economic systems, not political systems. It is not capitalism that allows me to criticize it, but the political system under which we live. Though some, like Milton Friedman, might argue that capitalism and democracy are naturally connected, I don't think that that is necessarily true. In fact, I believe that it would work better, from the capitalist class' perspective, under a more authoritarian system. Of course the average person would suffer more.
ReplyDeleteThe point of my post was that for some reason people think we only have two choices when it comes to an economic system. The old Soviet system where the state owns everything and brutal oppresses the people to keep what it has, or the capitalist system, where a few own most the wealth while the rest of us struggle just to get by and are lead to believe that we can be rich like them if we work hard. The former id overt oppression, the latter subtle oppression.
I could offer general alternatives, but my point was not to say I have the perfect solution, but to say that together we could come up with something better.