"I believe that capitalism has been the greatest creator of wealth and opportunity that the world has ever known.  But from big cities to rural villages around the world, we also know that prosperity is still cruelly out of reach for too many."

                             





The quote above is from President Obama's speech to the UN General Assembly in September of last year (2015), a speech that I referred to earlier this fall. I must say, I am going to miss this man when he is no longer the leader of the US. He is more than an able administrator and leader. He has vision. He keeps the big picture of the US and even the whole world always in mind. He always aims for balance in his uses of power and in his policies.   

I was speaking yesterday of how vital it is to achieve balance in a country's national policies and in its overall way of life. With balance in mind, he keeps telling the richest of Americans and the super-rich all over the world, this same profound truth. Yes, capitalism is the best wealth-making system that the world has ever found, but no, you do not get to keep every cent and evade all taxes just because you have shown you can produce wealth. Some kinds of "wealth" come by means that the rest of society cannot stand for. The heroin trade can turn profit of 1000% over the course of three days, which may make it sound great to those who measure all things by profit. But the rest of us are not going to sit by while you make money off of the suffering of others who happen to be weaker than you are. 

There are, of course, plenty of other ways of making wealth that involve damage to the fabric of society which the citizens in general can't tolerate. Make enough young men die in unsafe mines, and you will breed a revolution in a generation or less. So for wise, long term reasons as well as short term humanitarian ones, you're not going to run your business in any old way you please. There have to be rules. Damage the health of enough consumers with an unsafe, barely-tested product, and we are going to come after you, take your ill-gotten profits, and send you to jail. 

And it is worth reminding us all that some forms of wealth can't be valued in terms of money. What do parents pay their kids for being good kids, or even bad kids for that matter? What should they pay? On what grounds can those kids be fired? These are absurd questions. All things do not have a price tag. 

Capitalism is only a partial model of human society. Much of life lies outside of its scope, and therefore, it must always be open for revision.  

Overall, capitalism is a powerful producer of wealth, yes, but it came into existence inside of the circle of protection created by the larger community. Education, the rule of law, laws governing the use of roads, rail lines, shipping lines, airlines, and so on ...in a nation without these solidly in place, capitalism withers for the vast majority of businesses. It is just too hard to make a business work without the rule of law. People go back to subsistence farming. 

All of this may seem obvious, but it often is not. In fact, I hear regularly in the arguments of the worst of the capitalists that the fewer regulations and taxes corporations have to accept, the better off the whole nation will be. This is poppycock. A ten year old can figure it out for herself in two minutes. 

On another day, I will write about the unions I have known closely and of how some of them are guilty of abuses just as large as those of the corporations. 

But for today, a caution to those whose politics are right of center will do. 

Balance. Compromise. Rights of owners balanced with the rights of workers and the whole system kept functioning smoothly by a big majority of people who have implicitly agreed for decades or even centuries to live by the rule of law. These have to be in place and accepted as basic if we are going to fix our world.  

I'll close today with a quote from Senator Elizabeth Warren. Hopefully, after the election, she will still be in there. Keep fighting, Senator. You give me and many others real hope. 

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

                                    

                                           Sen. Elizabeth Warren (photo by: Tim Pierce)
                                                                                            https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AElizabeth_Warren_Nov_2_2012.jpg