Capitalism is a failure

Yes I know there are many who will disagree with me on this. Say that it's the only system we have, or that "works". But it hasn't.

Just off the top of my head, without even trying to look into anything at all, there is the obvious failure. It has made us into beings that instead of finding happiness in social interaction, we have deluded ourselves that it is in the acquisition of money and things. In Australia particularly, even though housing is completely unaffordable now to buy for the average bloke in Sydney, we have people virtually selling their souls to their job and life to buy a place here. I heard one bloke at work today telling another that his mortgage payments were about $700 a week. For a house way out in western Sydney, but which cost $480,000. People refuse to even entertain the thought that this property price will ever crash, or even go down at all. Not only is this delusion a part of the Capitalist failure, but it ignores the reality that what goes up must come down.

I used to years ago hear dreadful stories about the eastern block in Europe, and how terrible it was to live there. Soviet Union I don't consider as an example of how to be BTW, just an example of how bad things can get. But yet look at the West now. The whole of the EU is in economic and social decline. America, the bastion of Reaganomics, has half the population in poverty with 1% of the population owning over 40% of the wealth. Australia has the richest lady in the world, Gina Rinehart, who earns $600 a second but objects to paying tax on it. Today the dreadful stories are here in our communities, the only ones not affected are the sheltered elite. Just like Russia used to be, remember?

But as I said, even worse than that is the way this all affects human relationships. Greed, possessiveness, dog eat dog, work till you drop, the numbness that this all brings. Fuck everyone else. This is not about humanity and how we treat each other, this is about how the Capitalist system has made us treat each other. It's about who we are. Our societies, our goals, our collective consciousness. Capitalism has turned us into monsters, far removed from the communities our ancestors shared with each other even 100 or so years ago. This is about what we've become.

Perhaps Adam Smith's dream of Capitalism was much different than the vile mutation of it we have today? Perhaps that would work much better? Or perhaps the "invisible hand" doesn't even exist at all?

...global corporations are modern outlaws, living outside the law. There is noinvisible hand that regulates multinationals. In 1759 Philosopher Adam Smith argued that while wealthy individuals and corporations were motivated by self interest, an "invisible hand" was operating in the background ensuring that capitalist activities ultimately benefited society. In modern times this concept became the basis for the pronouncements of the Chicago School of Economics that markets were inherently self regulating. However, the last five years have demonstrated that there is no "invisible hand" -- unregulated markets have spelled disaster for the average person. The "recovery" of 2009-10 ensured that "too big to fail" institutions would survive and the rich would continue to be rich. Meanwhile millions of good jobs were either eliminated or replaced by low-wage jobs with poor or no benefits.

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