At its core, the inequality problem is a capitalist ownership problem. Market failure is an ownership failure. Capitalism treats planet and society as externalities because they aren’t persons under the law, yet businesses – ‘also not persons’ are accorded corporate personhood. That the system scams consumers to give businesses wealth incentives to innovate and deny planet wealth incentives to sustain us and society to cooperate is the mother of all injustices.
Capitalism is on life support. Because commerce started spontaneously, capitalism wasn’t built with these three things in mind,
1. an incentive/reward cycle. the systems that interact with it (planet and society) give, give and give it but receive almost nothing and they are now strained and can’t support the architecture of capitalism for long.
2. a support system for its fledglings – i.e. the system deems the poor and small businesses as unprofitable. Because they take less from the system, they’re less productive thus feed less into the system – making the whole system less productive.
3. a waste management mechanism. Any ‘processing’ yields waste, even programming languages have ‘garbage collection’ mechanisms. Capitalism’s waste – CO2, plastics, and other wastes, weaken the incentive/reward cycle and weaken the productivity of planet and society.
Capitalism as the unrivaled soul of human progress can’t exist without ‘planet’ and the global society, yet capitalism treats planet/society as externalities. This is because ‘planet’ and ‘society’ aren’t deemed as persons under the law yet ‘businesses’ who also aren’t real persons gradually attained personhood after the US 14th Amendment declared that “no person’s life, liberty, property can be infringed without due process of law.”
So, what if planet and society attained the same personhood that businesses enjoy?
I think,
If planet and society also attained the personhood that businesses enjoy, they wouldn’t depend on the generosity of self-interested businesses and philanthropy to fix their needs.
What do you think?
That’s true, but barring some huge change in the exact way capitalism works, I doubt it will ever happen.
True what you say. There’s hope though most Millennials & GenZ are more about equity than older generations. We just need to enhance this belief by hacking social-interest into self-interest.
So, my personal interest is not just a well-paying job, a nice house, car, luxuries, but also a flourishing planet and society. What’s the best way of implementing this hack? Place it in our daily purchases. Every time you buy something that brand sticks in your mind.
So what if x% of our purchases went to a neglected grassroots social/environment need, my mind will remember not just the iPhone, Shirt, travel ticket, etc but also the homeless kid i helped feed with the x% of my purchase. Then we will have more people not just empathising with planet and social ills but also taking instant daily action against the ills.