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Conscious Capitalism
Why Adam Smith was an original gangster
Disclaimer: The words that follow are solely the opinion of the author and are inevitably wrong. The best stuff is in the hyperlinks. Please enjoy.
I am an unapologetic capitalist. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon for people to call me a socialist. What’s up with that?
Well, I don’t think the way America is doing capitalism right now is the only way to do capitalism. I think we’re running capitalism on autopilot, and we need to wake the f*ck back on up and steer a little bit instead of depending on robot Uber Jesus to take the wheel and save our asses from ourselves.
Capitalism is a tool. It’s an incredible tool. Here’s the thing though, a tool can’t tell you what to do with it. It can suggest a purpose. Shovels seem like they would be pretty useful for digging holes. Give enough people a shovel without any explanation, a decent number of them are probably gonna do some digging at some point.
You can also use a tool in a way that is less than ideal though. You could hit yourself in the face with a shovel — not a great use for an otherwise helpful tool. I think we are currently hitting ourselves in the face with capitalism.
Capitalism is a set of rules for social interaction. It allows people the freedom to figure out for themselves what they are good at and then do whatever that happens to be so they can survive in the world.
Ideally, no one is forcing anyone to do something they don’t want to do.¹ We are all free to explore. If we create something that other people think is valuable, we can give them that thing in exchange for something we value. In this way, humans can meet a diverse array of needs very efficiently.
Some essential things need to be in place for capitalist marketplaces to function appropriately. Ideally, people need perfect information about what is being exchanged. There should not be any discrimination against buyers and sellers. People should have equal opportunities to enter and leave marketplaces. There should be uniform enforcement of contracts between buyers and sellers by a third party. Our current version of capitalism gets a lot of these things wrong in a lot of marketplaces.
