The following is an article by a man held in high esteem, and respect. THE MANS AN IDIOT! Let me tell you why.
Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
Commentary: In a Market Society, everything is for sale
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, capitalism is working ...
for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in
2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the
world’s wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated. And what that is the Billionaires fault? The fact that some people have MADE vast sums of money is a good thing. They didn't steal it. One person making wealth in no way harms another's ability to do so.
For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on
less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10
billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions,
wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a
day.That is not the fault of Capitalism. Capitalism isn't even practised in any part of the world, let alone the majority. Socialism, and Dictatorship is the majority rule of the world.
Over the years we’ve explored the reasons capitalism blindly continues
on its self-destructive path. Wrong Recently we found someone who brilliantly
explains why free-market capitalism is destined to destroy the world,
absent a historic paradigm shift: That is Harvard philosopher Michael
Sandel, Another Idiot author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right
Thing to Do?”
For more than three decades Sandel’s been explaining how capitalism is
undermining America’s moral values and why most people are in denial of
the impact.
Capitalism isn't undermining anything. Socialism and it's anti-god factions have been whats eroding the morals of society incrementally for 100 years His classes are larger than a thousand although you can take
his
Harvard “Justice” course online.
Yes you can get the reach of Radical Communism right in your own home from any University Sandel recently summarized his ideas about capitalism in the Atlantic. In “What Isn’t for Sale?” he writes:
“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from
having a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost
everything is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep
into almost every sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode
important values, non-market values.”
Sandel should be required reading for all Wall Street insiders as well
as America’s 95 million Main Street investors. Here’s a condensed
version: Everything has always been for sale, name a time when it wasn't.
In one generation, market ideology consumed America’s collective spirit
“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time
of market faith and deregulation — an era of market triumphalism,” says
Sandel. “The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not
government, held the key to prosperity and freedom.”And their policies led to a 20 year boom of prosperity
Justin Ide/Harvard University News Office
Michael Sandel
And in the 1990s with the “market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton
and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets
are the primary means for achieving the public good.”Wrong the ushered in the current collapse
Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and
market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not
arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as
if it came upon us,” says Sandel.That's because he is an idiot
Over the years, “market values were coming to play a greater and greater
role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today,
the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods
alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.”It always has, but it was tempered with faith and the morality that comes with faith in God
Examples: New free-market capitalism trapped in American brains
Yes, it’s everywhere: “Markets to allocate health, education, public
safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection,
recreation, procreation, and other social goods unheard-of 30 years ago.
Today, we take them largely for granted.”All those areas are controlled by the socialist politicians and their minions. Not one is market driven, they are dictated to on their functioning by bureaucrats that believe they know better than the common man. It is why everyone of those areas is failing.
Examples ... for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons ... outsourcing war
to private contractors ... police forces by private guards “almost twice
the number of public police officers” and are financially viable ... drug “companies aggressive
marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice ...
prohibited in most other countries.”
More: Ads in “public schools ... buses ... corridors ... cafeterias ... because the have milked the homeowner out of every penny of property tax that they can, and to support an average salary twice that of the common man golden pensions and healthcare packages they have reached the limit they can steal from the taxpayer. So the now get sponsors
naming rights to parks and civic spaces ... Also mostly paid for by TAX revenue blurred boundaries, within
journalism, between news and advertising ... marketing of ‘designer’
eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction ... buying and selling ... the
right to pollute carbon TAXES created by the socialist environmentalists ... campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to
permitting the buying and selling of elections.”
Why should you worry? Capitalism breeds corruption and inequality
But the 2008 crash challenged our faith in free-market capitalism: “The
financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to
allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that
markets have become detached from morals.”No it showed that when Government "Mandates" that banks give money that can't pay it back and then buys that bad paper and sells it on the world market, Government creates catastrophe
Then comes the big question: So what? “Why worry that we are moving
toward a society in which everything is up for sale?” Two big reasons
concern Sandel:
First, inequality: “Where everything is for sale, life is harder for
those of modest means.” If wealth just bought things, yachts, sports
cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities wouldn’t matter much. “But as
money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth
looms larger.”The voice of the true communist
Second, corruption: “Putting a price on the good things in life can
corrupt them ... markets don’t only allocate goods, they express and
promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.” Also
“corrupt the meaning of citizenship. Economists often assume that
markets ... do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue.
Markets leave their mark.”Pure babel that ignores the effects of the removal of faith from the public arena
Warning: Morals are new commodities auctioned to highest bidder
Sandel warns that our new dominating capitalist mind-set is crowding out
“nonmarket values worth caring about. When we decide that certain goods
may be bought and sold,” they become “commodities, as instruments of
profit and use.”
But “not all goods are properly valued in this way ... Slavery was
appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought
and sold at auction,” failing to “value human beings as persons, worthy
of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects
of use.”
Nor do we permit “children to be bought and sold, no matter how
difficult the process of adoption can be.” The same with citizenship ...
jury duty ... voting rights ... “we believe that civic duties are not
private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to
demean them, to value them in the wrong way.”
Many things should never be commodities.You decry the environment that has resulted by the insertion of socialism and the removal of god and morality from the public arena. A feat that has been achieved over the past 100 years by "Progressives" not Capitalists
America transforms from mere market economy to new market society
Sandel’s core message is simple: “The good things in life are degraded
if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and
where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value
the goods in question — health, education, family life, nature, art,
civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not
merely economic ones.”These are questions for the individual, led by his/her own moral code which used to be grounded in faith, not the domain of the political class or the group-think majority
Unfortunately, we never had that debate during the 30-year rise of
“market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it — without
ever deciding to do so — we drifted from having a market economy to
being a market society.”No we have had 100 years of "Progressives" driving us to this point, piece by piece
And “the difference is this: A market economy is a tool ... for
organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in
which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a
place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”
The difference is profound.
Not only did the debate never happen. It may never. Why? Because
politicians aren’t up to debating values, may be pushing us past the
point of no return.It is because the progressive agenda has always been the agenda of communism and no god. Since 1910 the progressives have incrementally insinuated socialism into our system till it has reached this point of collapse. They have done so deliberately and have never been willing to express their agenda openly
Today’s “political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable
television, partisan vitriol on talk radio and ideological food fights
on the floor of Congress,” says Sandel, so “it’s hard to imagine a
reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the
right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the
environment, citizenship and other goods.”You are the type of person that has brought it to this point.
Dysfunctional politicians pushing Americans past point of no return
Can we change? “The appeal of using markets to put a price on public
values, is that there’s no judgment on the preferences they satisfy.”
Debate is unnecessary. Markets don’t “ask whether some ways of valuing
goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay
for sex, or a kidney ... the only question the economist asks is ‘How
much?’ Markets ... don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and
unworthy ones.” Markets may never draw the line, but do politicians, in
secret?Who decides who is worthy? the bureaucrat ?
What is certain: Capitalism is eliminating moral values, as Nobel
economist Milton Friedman and capitalism’s philosopher Ayn Rand had been
preaching to the generation. Twisting the words of the greats doesn't bolster your deluded observations As Sandel puts it: “Each party to a deal
decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being
exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of
market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal.”
But unfortunately, market capitalism “has exacted a heavy price ... drained public discourse of moral and civic energy.”No socialist engineering of the market has done that
The good professor is a great teacher, with only one glaring flaw in his
logic: he’s too idealistic, too quixotic. You don’t have to be a
fatalist to know that without a total economic collapse, market
capitalists — including 1,426 billionaires, Wall Street bankers,
hedgers, lobbyists and every other special interest getting rich off the
new market society — will never voluntarily surrender their control
over the American political system.
Rather, they will blindly continue down their self-destructive path with
an absolute conviction they are divinely guided by the Invisible Hand
of Adam Smith, and perhaps even God. The true words of a man who doesn't even realize he is preaching Marx
Meanwhile, we have no choice but wait patiently till the collapse,
anxiously aware that our bizarre political system will just keep
degrading America’s moral values, pricing, buying, selling, trading
morals like commodities, because in the final analysis everything has a
price and everyone has a price in our hot new exciting Market Society.
If and when a full collapse takes place you are not going to be happy. The minority of socialist bureaucrats like yourself and Sandel will be amongst those that are hunted down for the cause of the collapse. America is supposed to be about Free Markets and Capitalism. Your ilk have polluted it to the point of dismay and disrepair that it is currently in. When it rights itself, which it will, you will find yourself on the short end of the stick
Paul B. Farrell is a MarketWatch columnist based in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWFarrell.
Argument concluded.
