Free From Efficiency

I'm having a hard time understanding why there are people, in the present time, who believe that capitalism is the most efficient system for the distribution of products. And they believe that this is because of the ability of free markets to determine the price of goods and services. Well... I believe it's time for these people to wake up.

I've written countless times before about the flaw in this belief in the efficiency of the capitalist economy. The flaw is in the capitalist understanding of the word "efficient". In capitalism everything is geared toward making profits and making the economy grow. Therefore "efficient" in the capitalist economy means everything that maximizes profits and growth, preferably in as short a time as possible. There's no concern for long term stability of sustainability. None. When proponents of capitalism speak of freedom, they only consider the freedom to chase after capitalism's main goals; profits and personal wealth. There's no consideration for the lack of freedom for those who fall behind and live in poverty. Worse even: they consider it an attack of their personal freedom when the government raises taxes to grant those unfortunates a small measure of freedom, the freedom to not starve to death.

The truth is that capitalism and free markets are the most inefficient system for producing and distributing products. Sure, it may have been the most effective system to grow the economy and to maximize wealth, but that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few, while the overwhelming majority of the planet's population lives in perpetual (relative) poverty. While contemplating all this we come across one of capitalism's greatest internal contradictions; capitalism, especially after the industrial revolutions, has the ability to produce large surpluses of almost everything, but the market's pricing mechanism demands products to be scarce. The rules of supply and demand dictate that supply needs to be low and demand high for products to have the highest price, for profits to be maximized. So, what happens in reality is that we produce too much, wasting resources, energy and labor, and then destroy the surpluses for prices to be maintained on profitable levels. We don't distribute those surpluses to the people who need them, we don't feed the hungry and don't house the homeless. No, we even arrest people who give away leftover food to the hungry, and we use the police to guard garbage containers of supermarkets so that the homeless can't "steal" the food they're about to throw away.

Capitalism is cold-hearted and supremely inefficient; don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Watch the below linked video, it does a great job at explaining all this and more. And use this information to inform the people you meet in your life who still believe in the "miracle of the free markets"; it's time they wake up because the planet is dying under this widespread misconception.

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