Remember my presumption that all three major economic systems are perfect that what they are intended to do? Well, each one is also the worse than the other two in a specific area. Stability is capitalism’s Achilles heel. Capitalism trades a significant increase in overall wealth generation at the price of wealth distribution (but not as much as many contend), and economic stability. Capitalism is cyclical. These cycles are not always easily predictable, and it is quite possible an attempt to make a prediction could, at least partially, become a self-fulfilled.
These cycles often cause anxiety. Once capitalism became widely accepted the people became accustomed to a standard of living (speaking materialistically) that was higher than yesterday’s and they expected tomorrows to be even higher. In these early years unmolested capitalism was running itself very well, and the populations of the countries with capitalism guided economies were more optimistic about their futures than at any time in their history. Obviously, not including the Africans who were sold into slavery – which, of course, reached the unimaginable levels that it did because of capitalism.
The only thing that these wide eyed optimistic capitalists feared was something that might cause them to just barely being able to afford basic needs, much less any of the “wants” that had become available recently due to profit inspired motivation fueling an explosion of new inventions designed to make life easier. Inventions which were, at the very least, created earlier because of capitalism and in many would have probably never been created were it not for capitalism making it possible for the inventors to profit.
If it’s as great as you say, what went wrong?
Capitalism had been growing steadily for quite a while, and it was about to hit a pubescent growth spurt. Like almost everything changing too quickly causes growing pains. By the time Capitalism was able to notice and react to the explosion of growth it already had a face full of pimples and had needed to become familiar with deodorant for quite some time. Capitalism had to react to these changes if it wanted to remain the boy all the girls swooned over.
Before this point all “economic” problems had been the result of a (or a combination of) widespread agricultural failures, war, disease, some other tangible anomaly. As countries began to rely on international trade for basic necessities for essentially the first time in history, the cause of economic problems resulted from a less tangible culprit. From now on the economic system itself would become an ever-increasing influence over a significant portion of people’s lives across the globe.
-next installment will start to look at economic “crises”
No comments:
Post a Comment