Right, capitalism has been a huge failure. Let's dismiss the meteoric rise of human race since Americas founding, and judge capitalism on a market correction.
In fact, though I'll be the first to admit I'm not familiar with Minsky's work, the article makes it sound like his theories are basically what we've been doing for the last 2 years (Prop up failing industries, use the government as an employer of last resort, etc...) I have two issues with this:
1. We've been doing just that for 2 years and the end result thus far is we're still in a recession and our government is dramatically poorer. When the government has to hold up "slowing job loss" as an accomplishment that doesn't impress me (It's also what FDR tried for 10 years to no avail)
2. In large part pumping money into failing institutions is what got us here. Let me cut through the economics babble and just put this in logical terms. Capitalism works because the best businesses succeed while the worst fail. If you prop up the worst so they can't fail you get a situation where they'll take crazy risks because there's no fear of failure. Hence where we are now.
So Microsoft, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Exxon are the best?
Microsoft made good enough software that ran on the cheapest hardware available. So people could do everything on a PC that they could do on say...a Mac for a fraction of the cost (sure it was probably harder to do but people obviously valued the money they saved more)
Wal-Mart sells products the cheaper than anyone else. 'nuff said.
McDonalds may not be the best food but they spend millions per year making sure it's consistent. You can go to a McDonalds in Los Angeles and a McDonalds in London and it's going to essentially be the same food. People value that. Plus it's again cheap and good enough.
Exxon has actually made several innovations in customer experience that help push it up over it's rivals. Here in Southern California for example we have SpeedPass which is an RFID device on your key chain that allows you to purchase gas quicker and without pulling out your wallet.
So the point is all those companies delivered what the market wanted.
Otherwise Wal-Mart products would be as cheap as they could be whilst still being made to last and be repaired and low impact, low energy, etc. - all products would be traded in a way that workers were not paid immorally low wages. McDonalds would sell food that is good enough to keep you healthy rather than being carefully chemically balanced to be good enough to bring you back next time (high sugar, high salt, high fat, strong marketing). Exxon would be investing not only in ways to let you give them money more quickly but hugely into increasing fuel efficiency and alternative transport systems that would use renewable resources.
Capitalism is bad because it lets us grow too quickly? I don't understand. Are you talking about market bubbles? Like that have been going on for four hundred years or more? If so, that's called a feedback loop: the system overgrows and then contracts. When you make a mistake and correct it, there's some adjustment involved. Surely that's better than no adjustment at all, right? I mean, to have everything perfectly valued would only happen in a fantasy world.
Or perhaps I misunderstood.
I do not believe judging a phenomenon as a success due to an effect of a weakness is rationally sound.
I would say capitalism is not as good an economic system as one that enables steady, predictable co-existence of human society and synergy with the earth above meteoric, unsustainable growth, which on the downside causes pain, suffering, misery, death and perhaps the decimation of spaceship earth.
Besides, the one driver of commerce and every little transaction isn't and can't be greed anyway - it's trust. It is silly to blame this recent bubble on capitalism and markets when it was just as much driven if not started by state actors. As for the rest - "unsustainable growth, which on the downside causes pain, suffering, misery, death and perhaps the decimation of spaceship earth" - bullocks.
Capitalism and markets have resulted in less pain, suffering, misery, and death than any of the alternatives. Indeed it has been a central driver in alleviating many of these problems by ensuring need is reflected in the incentives. Growth in the longer run means innovation and that more needs are being met and more suffering is being averted - and that, at least to me, is a good thing.
Right. The implicit cooperation. The implicit cooperation by the wealthy few that ultimately best serves the moguls' already grotesquely large fortune.
As an aside, we should really teach Marx better in modern schools. We teach the brilliance of his insights without then following it up with the many ways he was mistaken. I think sometimes Marx is being taught by the Humanities department and not Economics professors.
Capitalism magnifies inequality as those with money get richer and those without toil to that end.
To varying degrees, societies make a value choice (whether implicitly or explicitly): that people to live unequal but wealthier or equally poorer. There really isn't much of a middle ground - or at least not that yet exists. I find it curious that those of a certain ideological persuasion focus more on the inequality rather than income mobility which is, what at least I believe to be more important and why many of us here seek to create and build our own businesses.
Surely you can't believe the planet itself is going to explode or something, can you? I mean, what you're really saying is that more growth will make the planet into a state that you find offensive and hard to live with -- dirty skies, polluted water, etc.
If that's the case then I'm with you. Glad to talk about how clean we want to make things and what kind of rules we want to put on ourselves so the world meets our ascetic approval. (offline, of course)
I don't think you believe the planet itself is going to be destroyed. Life will continue, right? It'll just get ugly and uninhabitable for poor people -- which is not an acceptable option, by the way, but it's not destruction.
Or are you somewhere in the middle, thinking that somehow the planet will manage to kill just us and the rest of the ecosystem (or what's left of it) will continue?
When you use words like that, you really still need to explain yourself some more. I'm just grasping at straws here.
If we can get twice as far on a litre of petrol with no other costs (worse car, etc.) that is economic growth.
What about the stone age, bronze age, iron age... gun powder, the wheel... Fire!
These inventions may have had a much greater impact on human well-being than anything you mentioned and all were way before the promotion of capitalism.
Capitalist countries like the US, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa are the most crime ridden in the world. In the US alone more than a million people is in prison. People live in gated communities to protect themselves. Due to the digital divide only a small part of the world population has Internet access.
Surely, a greater portion of the population has access to food and medicine than at almost any other point in history. Communism has scored some massive failures when it comes to feeding people (5 year plans, etc. etc...)
> Globally the literacy is very poor and education rudimentary.
Surely, the world literacy rate is higher than at almost any point in history.
> There are more slaves now in the world than in any other periods of history.
As a percentage?
> Capitalist countries like the US, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa are the most crime ridden in the world.
I believe this point to be accurate and relevant, although the high US crime rate is probably also related to our common law system.
> Due to the digital divide only a small part of the world population has Internet access.
But still far more than at almost any point in history! The internet is a great sticking point in debates about government investment. I don't think it would exist without capitalism, but I gather that it was greatly accelerated by government R&D money.
There was no commnism yet. It was state capitalism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism