The right and left wings of our country have gotten embroiled in a debate over government regulations that makes no sense. Why not? Both sides mean the same thing. The right wing wants free market capitalism, the left wing wants regulations to protect free market capitalism.
Granted that capitalism is the best system we know for creating and preserving a healthy economy, it is equally true that capitalism is destroyed by cheating. When cheaters profit, capitalism ceases because money ends up in the wrong hands. This is why government regulations are needed to make sure the playing field is level—and stays level.
A simple example involves the classical notion of a better mousetrap. Under capitalism, a company that builds a better mousetrap reaps the benefit of increased demand and greater profits—and possibly may drive inferior mousetraps out of business. It’s supposed to work this way. Everyone in our society is supposed to benefit as superior goods and services drive out inferior ones. But let’s suppose that unscrupulous people, driven by greed instead of capitalism, find ways to cheat:
Political cheating would include (1) manipulating a government agency like the Consumer Protection Agency to ignore or falsify mousetrap testing; (2) using a powerful figure, like a president or senator, to attack the scientific evidence for the superior mousetrap; (3) creating a tax on this better mousetrap and accepting political contributions from inferior companies to give them an advantage in the marketplace—as is currently happening when Trump doles out cash to Fed Ex and UPS but withholds funds for the Post Office. Politicians who un-level the playing field have no right to call themselves capitalists.
Corporate cheating would consist of creating fake research (which is easy to do), accompanied by misleading advertising. It would include all variations on corporate price-fixing—which, if you’ve noticed, is all around us in our heating bills, in our grocery bills, and at the gas pump. This un-leveling of the playing field uses sheer corporate size to divert consumers away from the choices capitalism is supposed to offer. We know that Trump profited in business simply by refusing at the last minute to pay workers what he’d contracted to pay. Then he’d invite them to sue, knowing full well that corporate size usually wins in court struggles. Corporations can maneuver to divert funds away from paying their workers, but since these funds end up in the wrong hands, this can never be called capitalism—just another version of cheating.
Bullying and Strong-arming: Back in the 19th century, American industrial leaders used to cheat by using terrorism, mowing down workers with machine guns. Even today, some school children are given textbooks referring to Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller as leaders in industrial capitalism, yet the record shows that they used strong-arming and violence to cheat the citizenry out of true capitalism. Rather than competing to build a better mousetrap, they used a peculiar version of “private enterprise” to threaten truckers not to deliver anyone else’s better mousetrap, only inferior ones made by companies that agreed to pay kickbacks. Or, if this didn’t work, cheaters would simply sneak into the mousetrap’s factory and sabotage their assembly line or delivery system—or else just fire-bomb the whole place, as has happened over and over in this country.
Capitalism thrives when money ends up in the hands of the maker of the best mousetrap. Cheating destroys capitalism because money ends up, not in the hands of those who created better goods or services, but whoever was best at managing to lie, cheat, and fool the system. Then capitalism dies, not destroyed by Karl Marx but by the USA’s own willingness to vote for cheaters.
We’re being fooled by right wing politicians who claim allegiance to capitalism but turn a blind eye to cheating. We need left wing politicians to step up with unflagging support for capitalism alongside an uncompromising attack on cheaters. When it comes to the Consumer Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Inspector General, and a host of other Federal agencies, their sacred mandate is to preserve a level field for capitalism to survive. Their regulations protect us from cheaters. Attacking them or their regulations is attacking capitalism—and inviting more cheating.
