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In a nutshell, the case for capitalism is strongly tied to human motivation ~ that a society driven by the concept of money will be the more motivated and productive ~ thus enables earths resources to be utilized in the best possible ways which in turn will (theoretically) result in maximum output. End result being more for everyone and better for the society as a whole.
"Better for society as a whole due to efficient use of resources"
Such claims have been put to test and the results speak for itself whether the ideology has indeed been effectively living up to its claim.
Firstly, on the so called demand & supply ~ the demand refers to demand from people with purchasing power. the homeless and cashless (those not included in the current existing system e.g those colonized thus stripped of their own land and losing the means / land to sustain themselves through the traditional means of farming) were totally excluded from the picture. Apparently the system excludes cashless people as humans.Generally, a society is a social contract among citizens. No one owes you a living; neither do you owe others a living. Should society deprives you access to food, I think its only fair to pay no heed to property rights and proceed to grow your own food. " For the earth, which was here before Man, is not the fruits of anyone's labor, and is not private property in the same sense as labor products. Everyone has a right to access land, limited only by the equal rights of others to do the same. State-issued titles to unlimited property in land, which allows some to hold vast amounts, often without use or with a merely nominal use, and without continual compensation of those dispossessed, violates this principle." ~ Slavery through monopoly of land.
Abo, A Woman of Kongo, author Ludo Martens quotes an African woman
“Our ancestors were free and independent in their country. One day Whites came to colonize them…Whites forced us to pay taxes and to execute hard labour. Then they sent us priests with the mission to convince us to work voluntarily for Whites. We didn’t even want to listen to them. Then they grabbed small children from their mothers on the pretext that they were orphans. These children worked hard in farms in order to learn the religion of the Whites!
Little by little they imposed their religion on us. What is it telling us? It teaches us that we must not love money; we must love the good Lord. But them, don’t they love money? Their companies like the Oil Mills of Belgian Congo are earning tens of millions thanks to our sweat. Not loving money is accepting a slave job for a starvation salary.
They also forbid us to kill. But them, don’t they kill? Here in Kilamba in 1931, they massacred over one thousand villagers. They (their priests) forbid us to kill only to prevent us from fighting the occupying forces. Priests also forbid us to steal. But them, they stole from us our country, our lands, all our wealth, our palm groves. When a Black man steals, he has to tell it at the confession to the priest. Then the priest runs to inform the White boss and the authorities and the Black man is expelled from his job and put in prison.”
Secondly, on the need to comply with existing system's rule of paper profit ~ misleading and preventing the masses from having a thorough understanding on the difference between money and wealth. Contrary to its claim of creating more to put an end to scarcity and poverty, the system sees the need to create artificial scarcity in the midst of plenty. Motivated to create and sustain scarcity. Milk are poured away due to fear of over supply and unable to charge a profitable market price. True Wealth is being destroyed for the sake of money (Paper profits - metaphysical digits which is supposed to act as means of exchange to allocate wealth ....has become an end in itself.) when there are actual demand for those goods. (Rather throw away than allow those cashless to have it.). Not forgetting the all too common issue of planned obsolescence. All these points down to the conclusion that there is a need to create artificial scarcity in order for businesses in the existing system to prosper. Those motivated by money are motivated to create scarcity and deny people from access to unused resources rather than efficient utilization of resources. Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" is nothing more than a dogmatic religion.
It's no secret that city dwellers, whom grew up in an environment where almost everything one has is bought, find it hard to understand how some "3rd world" people mange to live on less than a dollar a day. Property rights. They generally build their own shelter, grow, herd and hunt their own food, gather their own water and fuel and make their own clothes. The surplus that they manged to sell off to a market fetches them a dollar. They live off not on that 1 dollar money but through their freedom to do their stuff on land without deterrent like property rights.
Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System
"The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear — that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men who manage the country's industrial system. Otherwise there will be “overproduction,” business depression, and consequent hard times all around. Overproduction means production in excess of what the market will carry off at a sufficiently profitable price. So it appears that the continued prosperity of the country from day to day hangs on a “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency” by the business men who control the country's industrial output. They control it all for their own use, of course, and their own use means always a profitable price. In any community that is organized on the price system, with investment and business enterprise, habitual unemployment of the available industrial plant and workmen, in whole or in part, appears to be the indispensable condition without which tolerable conditions of life cannot be maintained.
That is to say, in no such community can the industrial system be allowed to work at full capacity for any appreciable interval of time, on pain of business stagnation and consequent privation for all classes and conditions of men. The requirements of profitable business will not tolerate it. So the rate and volume of output must be adjusted to the needs of the market, not to the working capacity of the available resources, equipment and man power, nor to the community's need of consumable goods."
Eric Fromm, The Sane Society
"Our direction of economic affairs is scarcely more encouraging. We live in an economic system in which a particularly good crop is often an economic disaster, and we restrict some of our agricultural productivity in order to "stabilize the market," although there are millions of people who do not have the very things we restrict, and who need them badly."
Artificial scarcity leads to rise in crime rate (from those with no other resorts to gain access to resources) which in turn leads to the unnecessary rise in demand for police law enforcers. The logic of the existing system is pretty puzzling. Create Scarcity by rather throwing away resources and deny those dispossessed fellow man from having access to them in order to have a high crime rate in return. So as to create employment for policeman? Another Bastiat’s broken window fallacy ? Narrow minded Keynesian fanatics as usual who sees employment figures as everything. To these bunch of so called economists, I wonder does a highly automated technological society where people, sharing only the load of those yet to be automated tasks, working only 4 hours per day are being labelled as having a bad economy?
"One of the problems of the Keynesian view of the world is the focus on what happens to output and unemployment rather than why these variables are moving. Not surprisingly, we get to the conclusion that going to war (or having a natural disaster) would be a good way to achieve full employment."
Does Capitalism lives up to the claim of efficiency for the common good? Or is it just another mode of slavery with the main purpose of control over the masses.
With regards to the claim for the need for some "necessary evil" to prevent over-population, I think one can easily lookup the statistics of those relatively wealthy nations and see for yourself whether humans have a tendency to keep multiplying for the sake of multiplying. Etc Japan. Not only is the population shrinking, the suicide rates are astonishing. Draw your own conclusion.
A nation conquer another nation is for control over resources. Should the colonized native population increase, there is this looming threat of balance being restored.by the local oppressed. It's not surprising that it's always the same vested interest whom keep harping on Malthusian Theory, birth control, religion and opium.
Alan Watts
"The fear that adequate production and affluence will take away all restraint on the growth of population is simply against the facts, for overpopulation is a symptom of poverty, not wealth. Japan, thus far the one fully industrialized nation of Asia, is also the one Asian country with an effective program of population control. The birth rate is also falling in Sweden, West Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. On the other hand, the poorer nations of Asia and Africa resent and resist the advice that their populations be pruned, in the feeling that this is just another of the white man’s tricks for cutting down their political power. Thus, the one absolutely urgent and humane method of population control is to do everything possible to increase the world’s food supply, and to divert to this end the wealth and energy now being squandered on military technology."
"Once the demand for quantity is satisfied, we seek quality. As human power to gratify our wants increases, our aspirations grow. At the lower levels of desire, we seek merely to satisfy our senses. Moving to higher forms of desire, humans awaken to other things. We brave the desert and the polar sea, but not for food; we want to know how the earth was formed and how life arose. We toil to satisfy a hunger no animal has felt, a thirst no beast can know. Given more food and better conditions, animals and vegetables can only multiply — but humans will develop. In the one case, the expansive force can only extend in greater numbers. In the other, it will tend to extend existence into higher forms and wider powers.None of this supports Malthus' theory. Facts do not uphold it, and analogy does not support it. It is a pure figment of the imagination, like the preconceptions that kept people from recognizing that the earth was round and moved around the sun. This theory of population is as unfounded as if we made an assumption about the growth of a baby from the rate of its early months. Say it weighed ten pounds at birth and twenty pounds at eight months. From this, we might calculate a result quite as striking as that of Mr. Malthus. By this logic it would be the size of an elephant at twelve, and at thirty would weigh over a billion tons."
Bertrand Russell's Proposed Roads to Freedom:
"Malthus contended, in effect, that population always tends to increase up to the limit of subsistence, that the production of food becomes more expensive as its amount is increased, and that therefore, apart from short exceptional periods when new discoveries produce temporary alleviation, the bulk of mankind must always be at the lowest level consistent with survival and reproduction. As applied to the civilized races of the world, this doctrine is becoming untrue through the rapid decline in the birthrate; but, apart from this decline, there are many other reasons why the doctrine cannot be accepted, at any rate as regards the near future."
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