This is a page for everything in economics too small to get a page of its own, like...
43 percent of British workers have problems sleeping because of work worries.
(source: NOP poll,''95)
Markets uber alles
Pundits can find some really absurd examples of what happens when government tampers with business (some of which are only exaggerated, rather than completely made up) but they forget one thing: it takes two to tangle.
You can blame the government, but guess what the other half of the equation is? Government does part of the screw up, and capitalism does the rest - yet these pundits always want to get rid of government regulations, not capitalism. It's capitalism that tries to find a loophole through every law, resulting in masses of red tape. Capitalists complaining about red tape is like rabid dogs complaining about the discomfort cause by their muzzles.
What about ESOP?
"EMPLOYEE Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP)...give each employee a share or two in stock, which confers upon them the same social and economic decision making power enjoyed by all small stockholders in huge enterprises: none" -[ p124 The Next America Michael Harrington]
Dishonesty
"Our business leaders...have always been skillful in conveying one picture of their effectiveness to the public and a different picture to their stockholders. In the latter they must be powerful, effective generators of large profits. To the latter they present themselves as straws in the wind, powerless to influence events, the mere servants of market forces..." -Paul L Wachtel (_The Poverty of Affluence_ p262) A great example of this is advertisers - they claim that they couldn't possible have the effects they are accused of, despite the fact that someone is betting lots of money on the idea that they can and do. Cigarette advertisers claim they only want to make smokers change brands - I wonder if condom advertisers use the same logic? "No, we don't want people to have safe sex, we just want those who do to change brands!"
Even the most imaginative can't justify the rags to riches myth
Horito Algar wrote fiction books about characters going from rags-to-riches, yet even in his imagination it was impossible - his characters got rich because of heroic actions in front of a rich person, who "at once rewards him with a handsome gift of money to finance his first steps upwards to fame and fortune." [R. Richard Wohl] In "Ragged dick", the character gets $10,000, rich clothes, and a job for saving a drowning child (with a rich father, of course!) This is also known as being in the right place at the right time.
The tragedy of the commons
Unless one makes every piece of land, water and air private property, marketplaces suffer from the tragedy of the commons. This is when self-interest seekers keep their assets while dumping their liabilities somewhere else. Pollution is the most obvious. The government is another - for example, businesses will profit from cheap labour in forieng dictatorships, but when the people revolt, the military goes in and the taxpayers pay the cost. Car companies name their cars after wild animals and advertise them to testoserone-poisonened teenagers, (ditto with alcohol companies) but they're not the ones who have to pick up the pieces at car crash sites.
Property versus pacifism
When people have billions of times more money than others, it is not because one worked billions of times harder - it is because one used a system of violence to his advantage.
Business (capitalism) is based on owners making unfair deals with workers - when the owner goes to the opera, somebody has to pay for it.
Under capitalism workers aren't trading what they make for money - they are selling themselves (prostituting, if you will) for an amount of time. The deal is that they'll get paid if they obey the guy with the money, who is using his property (and the government, which protects his property) as a way to gain authority. Of course, it usually isn't the owner who's literally giving the orders - someone else is hired for this task - but in the end, the owner of the property calls all the shots concerning his property.
This authoritarian control alienates workers from their own work, and from themselves. Workers no longer govern themselves during work hours - that is, THEY ARE NOT FREE.
Capitalism makes human beings a commodity, like logs or fertilizer, if only for a certain amount of time. Basically, it's like temporary slavery. It is, as Proudhon said, an "outrage upon human dignity and personality." [The Great Transformation, p. 219]
Socialism considers work to be a source of pride and joy, a creative act that is part of being human. When a person's control of their work is taken from them, they are hurt, and most likely they will hate work. In some "primitive" societies, there is/was no "incentive" to work - yet it always got done, because humans are humans.
Separating work from other activities of work causes bizarre results - for example, why is it when a cook works at a restaurant and is paid, yet is not paid for doing the exact same thing at home? Thousands of years of common sense activity based on sharing and mutual aid are flushed down the toilet by wage labor.
In conclusion, capitalism claims it's about "economic freedom" - which is precisely what it is not. Economic freedom means working for yourself and those you co-operate with - not following a bosses dictates.
The same old lie is being repeated everywhere: "we'll all be rich if we eat the poor". We're told how much cheaper our cars and radios and handcuffs are, our cheap golden calves and human-hair shirts. They say it's because of the rich and their heroism. "It's good for the rich man to watch Lezarius starve" they say. There's a word for this, it's called "evil". Whenever you see someone trying to defend "those poor rich people" just translate it to what they really mean - "evil is good".
President Reagan told a joke, which I'll shorten:
I'm at a farm (eating pork) and I notice a three legged pig with three medals, so I ask about it. The farmer says that it saved his life once, then it saved his wife's life, then his son's life. "And a pig like that, well, you don't eat all at once!"
He claimed it was about "how collectivists treat those poor rich people". In fact he'd plagiarized it from a socialist joke, with the pig being a worker and the farmer's family being management. Notice how suddenly the joke actually makes sense?
Basically, the hierarchy of values in capitalism puts human beings down below property and commodities (logs and fertilizer, as mentioned above). An property owner is no different than any other human, yet they use that property to control humans.
Capitalism only values a person as representing a certain amount of the commodity called "labour power," in other words, as a *thing*. Instead of being valued as an individual -- a unique human being with intrinsic moral and spiritual worth -- only one's price tag counts. (What's the difference between a Chinese political prisoner in a gulag and a unionized American again?)
Through capitalism all social relationships -- and so, ultimately, *all* individuals-- are commodified. In capitalism, literally nothing is sacred-- "everything has its price" -- be it dignity, self-worth, pride, honour -- all become commodities up for grabs.
Erich Fromm: "The conflict between capital and labour is much more than the conflict between two classes, more than their fight for a greater share of the social product. It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity." [_The Sane Society_, pp. 94-95]
The amount of insanity and inefficiency caused by this system is probably impossible to guess. For an example, I will focus on one particular insanity, "consumerism", when people try to fill an empty void in their soul through the hoarding of property. Of course, objects can't replace freedom, so more is gathered, and more.
This process is, of course, encouraged by the advertising industry, which tries to convince us to buy what we don't need because it will make us popular/sexy/happy/free/etc. Of course, it doesn't - freedom and popularity cannot be bought (and if they could, nobody would sell them!). We only feel free when (gasp) we actually are free.
Of course, this is not an argument against wealth - it's just a statement that freedom and humanity is better than wealth. Most wealth is good ( "Most", because bombs and slaves are wealth), and some wealth, like gold bars, is useless, and shouldn't have been worked for. Democracy will create more wealth, through efficiency and the actual enjoyment of work, and will make that wealth go farther, through sharing etc.
Questions on economics answered:
What are the myths of capitalist economics?
Why are anarchists against private property?
What's wrong with conservative economics?
Is capitalism empowering and/or based on human action?
But don't people make better decisions when money's involved?
Do classes exist in modern society, and if so, what are they?
What determines prices within capitalism?
Why do "markets" become dominated by big business?
Can big business dominence be changed?
Doesn't Hong Kong show the benifits of capitalism?
Doesn't Chile show that capitalism benifits everyone?
Will "free market" capitalism benifit everyone?
Is state control of credit responsible for the business cycle?
And now, it's time to scrape the bottom of the barrel:
Don't laugh, this is actually an argument I saw in a newspaper, from a right-wing think-tank. Whatever billionaries paid this think-tank sure aren't getting their money's worth!
For those who are white, richly dressed, or able to outrun security guards and kitten-fed attack dogs, rich neighborhoods are quite safe.
Of course the rich commit crime (in the literal, sense possession of stolen property not included) but for them it is "white-collar", or, to put it bluntly, just plain white. Corporate criminals steal and kill from a distance - through fraud, monopoly, low safety standards, pharmaceutical drug dealing etc. It's the difference between using a bayonet and firing an artillery gun. Since all of the victims are in other neighborhoods, the rich must be nice fellows.
This argument is like saying that all those folks in the Warsaw ghetto should have converted to Nazism because there are so few beatings in Hitler's cottage. It is pathetic, but it follows the right-wing think-tanker's motto: if you can't convince them, confuse them!
This is like the right-wing argument that if we all acted like Hong Kong (which isn't totally capitalist anyway, but that's irreverent) we'd all be as rich as Hong Kong. A parallel to this argument is that is we all build vaults in our basements, we'll be as rich as any bank. In any society you can't have all people being stock market wizards or CEOs of software companies with the initials MS - somebody has to scrub the toilets. And in capitalism, there has to be a majority of workers to be profited from. Right-wingers get us drooling with their Forbes magazines and their worship of riches - yet without some massive technological breakthrough, every person on earth will not be able actually create billions of dollar's worth of wealth with any tools.
Capitalism is like a lottery - it's obvious that the vast majority lose. Yet lottery ads always show the winner, just like Forbes and other propaganda - they don't show the losers, the ones from which the winner's money came from.