I’m continuing my reporting on the current installment of Conservative Estimate, the recently founded website that is devoted to demolishing Conservatism.
On Friday, Mr. George showed that Capitalism, being founded on an unjust act of economic force, must be considered an intrinsically immoral system.
Today, he discusses the fact that Capitalism’s injustice can be mitigated somewhat, but it can never be removed.
Let’s see what he has to say after the interlaced orange tongues.
Mr. George begins today’s installment by asking whether Capitalism’s inherent immorality makes all capitalists evil, and he answers that this would be absurd.
Many of them don’t even know about the violence at the bottom of the system. Most of them think that they are dealing fairly with the people who work for them.
But ignorance does not excuse everything, and even if the ignorant capitalist is not entirely guilty, he is not entirely innocent either.
[T]heir ignorance does not change the fact: The leverage that capitalists hold over workers is the fear of unemployment and destitution. The person who uses that leverage either consciously or unthinkingly is not someone who ought to be considered morally upright.
Mr. George then goes on to point out that decent capitalists try to protect their workers, even if they don’t understand that the entire system is unjust, simply out of common humanity:
In the current recession, who hasn’t heard about employers who have taken a financial hit themselves in order to keep paying their workers enough to at least scrape by? These employers show that it is possible to mitigate the consequences of the violence at the root of capitalism.
But, he continues, it is not possible to remove the injustice of Capitalism entirely. More than likely, such generous capitalists will be driven out of business by more ruthless capitalists who can take advantage of the generous capitalist’s lack of focus on the bottom line.
In conclusion, Mr. George says that such attempts to mitigate the injustice of Capitalism can go some ways to soften the harshness of the system, but they cannot eliminate it.
There may be decent capitalists. But the capitalist system is not decent. Its dependence on economic force makes it immoral, and no amount of decency on the part of its practitioners can remove that stain.
You can read the whole post
here.
Tomorrow, Mr. George will discuss why, in the standoff between workers and capitalists, the workers’ rights are always superior to the capitalists’ rights.
I’ll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.