which have been floating around my mind for some time, and which have somewhat coalesced as a result of the build-up to tomorrow's Democratic debate, including the remarks of Bernie Sanders on Meet the Press, and the obnoxiousness of Chris Matthews tonight constantly calling Sanders a Socialist in a demeaning fashion.
First, the prophet of Capitalism, Adam Smith, was, I remind people Professor of Moral Philosophy. Second, his theoretical model including the so-called invisible hand presumed perfect knowledge by all players in the market place. Any reasonable study of economics nowadays deals with the fact that such perfect knowledge never exists. Third, economics had to develop the notions of market failure and externalities to account for the real world, where government intervention is absolutely necessary to prevent catastrophe or the transference of the cost of some things (e.g. environmental damage) from the actors to the bystanders.
Yes, I know that is a simplification. But constitutionally the United States has NEVER been a free market capitalist economy: Article I Section 8 gives the Congress the power to protect patents and copyrights, which by their very nature prevent a totally free market, and to set up procedures for bankruptcies, an action that as Donald Trump illustrates often allows corporate bad actors to privatize their gains while socializing their losses onto others.
There are some things that absolutely should not be capitalistic, and if one believes in any sense of a common good, there should be public goods and services not subject to the profit motivation above all else. The judicial system, the criminal justice establishment, the air we breathe, the water necessary for all of us, public lands for the public good, public education, provisions for public health - other societies seem to understand this, some people in those societies are more than wealthy, and the people in those societies are as a whole far happier than are Americans, suffer far less poverty, infant mortality, etc.
To equate money with speech is to distort the very notion of what Madison intended in the First Amendment.
Perhaps this will condemn me in the eyes of many but to me what is exceptional about this nation is how much we have allowed the principles on which this nation is supposed to be based to be distorted and perverted. There are few nations more hypocritical than the so called land of the free, not with the number we incarcerate and execute, not with the backdoor recreation of debtors prisons, not with the seeming legitimatization of demonizing others - perhaps now Muslim, in the past Jews and Catholics and Mormons (and all three groups should remember the discrimination and persecution to which they were subjected in the earlier days of this nation).
If we are a Res Publica then our political infrastructure should not become the wholly owned subsidiary of the very wealthy and the corporations.
It is not just that banks and other financial institutions are now "too big to fail" it is also that our media is corporatized, that our legal system is perverted, and that the opportunities of individual advancement are being destroyed through privatizing of primary and secondary education and pricing the cost of higher education out of the reach of increasing numbers.
We as a society have some hard facts we need to face.
We as individuals need to examine how the accumulation of our individual actions contributes to the perilous situation in which we as a society now found ourselves.
I claim no answers.
I am in the final year of my 7th decade, now with more questions and doubts than ever - not only about our society, but about myself and my purpose.
I will watch the debate.
I have already voted for Virginia elections this year.
I still attempt to teach.
I less frequently write - I wonder to what end.
This I do know - the more we emphasize capitalism the less we seem to value democracy. It is not that they are inherently at odds, although to some degree they are. It is that economics without moral purpose is destructive of humanity, and democracy, for all its flaws, is still the best hope for the greatest portion of humanity. Perhaps we as Americans ought to remember that and to act accordingly, in both our economic and political actions?
Peace.