Efficiency – The God Who Failed
Capitalism is often touted for its efficiency. Marx understood this, Smith wrote about it, and, by God, have the pundits been at it since then. But efficiency ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, and it’s high time we admitted it.
The fifth sense is that wealth tends to become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. As some firms do better than others, they buy up the resources of the failed firms. Massive wealth differentials ensure; in the United States, one percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. If that’s an “efficient allocation of resources”, then I’m Orphah Winfrey. What the hell are these one percent going to DO with all that loot? Sure, they can spend some of it on Ferraris and yatchs, but the rest either lies idle or needs to be recycled back into the only thing it’s useful for under capitalism: converting it to more wealth, either by lending it to the peasants (you guys), or acquiring more productive capacity, or both. And so it goes. The system is like a bicycle: it can stand without supports, but it needs to be moving. And to move it needs to grow, and to grow it needs to find markets to dump its superflous junk on, and to… Oh, and did I mention the environment?
There’s a word for all this: insane. Though frankly, when you look at the state of the world today, insane just doesn’t capture it. By the way, the UN recently reported that 1 billion people now face hunger. In a world with space shuttles that can – get this – put telescopes into orbit around our planet, people are still going hungry. So yes, capitalism is by some measures very efficient. But by others, it is staggeringly, horribly inefficient.
Scarce resources? I think not. More like humanity’s misplaced priorities.
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