So the other day, I wrote my grand overarching theory of morality. Today, I want to expand it into politics, laying the basis for what Andrew Yang (and myself) call human centered capitalism. it's actually in my iteration, humanist capitalism, as it directly follows from my secular humanist roots, but yang's term is actually pretty accurate too. i could tell when he ran for president we mostly meant similar things.
The economy exists to serve human wants and needs, nothing more, nothing less
We tend to treat the economy as this force of nature that can never be messed with ever. However, all our economic system is, is a human institution we devised in order to fulfill human wants and needs. I admit, it hasn't always been fair. As I will discuss later our actual system, to some extent, fails to live up to our ideals here, and that's somewhat by design. But I will say this, the economy exists to serve us, not us it, and it should be structured around serving our needs no matter what form it takes.
Why capitalism?
People might ask, well okay, isn't capitalism....evil? After all, as Marx (and even myself) would point out, our system doesn't really serve us, it serves the rich. It's true that our institutions fail to meet our human needs well. It's true our system was designed to effectively enslave us. it's true that our system for all of the good it does, mostly serves the rich.
However, such is the state of all of statism. it didn't stop us from fixing it with the enlightenment. States didn't actually come from the social contract. They came when authoritarian strong men got enough of a following that they forcefully conquered others and subjected them to coercive conditions to make them part of their empire. Capitalism is just another iteration of this. It has made some progress from the olden days of feudalism, however. It's based, in theory, on the principle of free exchange, voluntary participation, and it does tend to speak the language of freedom, it just doesn't deliver on it in practice. My goal is to create a better form of capitalism that fulfills these promises.
Also, capitalism has done good by humanity to some degree. Economic growth has made it possible to have living standards that weren't remotely possible in its absence. Before 1800, we lived mostly in poverty in a truly scarcity driven environment. it really was work or starve. For all the criticism I have of capitalism and its exploitativeness, the biggest flaw with it is really the fact that despite all of the progress it has made, it really just doesn't deliver well for all people. As I like to say, it's a great wealth creator, not a great wealth distributor.
Besides, for all of the talk of overthrowing it and replacing it with something else, that has never worked. We had many marxist revolutions where the biggest critics of capitalism could implement other systems, and they mostly failed to implement anything attractive. We ended up with revolutions that created power vacuums, and this led to authoritarian dictatorships. Replacing the market, which admittedly does have signals to distribute goods and services somewhat effectively via supply and demand and free exchange, with command economies via "socialism" has mostly been a failure. While a handful of industries, such as healthcare or infrastructure, do seem better in the hands of the state, most of the economy tends to stagnate and fail to achieve human needs. For as much as I talk about how capitalism is coercive with work, the socialism that has replaced it in those states replaces a metaphorical gun to the head with a literal one. Because the entire thing is only held together by force, it kind of implodes the second a chance to liberalize opens up, which is what happens with the USSR, otherwise you just get repressive dictatorships to reinforce the current system into place.
Whatever the problems with capitalism are, the cure is worse than the disease.
The pros and cons of reform
On the other hand, reformists have, on the other hand, done a much better job at fixing the issues with capitalism. Liberals and social democrats are the ones who gave us things like labor laws, environmental protections, unions, social programs, etc. These changes have made capitalism far more tolerable, although in my own country of the US, we have often failed to go far enough. Some countries have universal healthcare, we do not. Some have shorter work weeks like 35 hours a week, or 4-6 weeks of paid vacation time, or paid family leave. We lack many of these protections. We tend to have a work fetish that makes us work longer for less.
Honestly, this failure to adapt greater changes have caused me to question this system more deeply, and now I believe that we haven't gone far enough in reforming capitalism. Even more so, I feel like, after going over what's wrong with capitalism at its core, that even the social democracies of Europe haven't gone far enough in some ways.
The core problem with capitalism at this point
The core problem of capitalism at this point is that we are a society fixated on work.
I get it, we need some people working in order to meet our wants and needs. However, the economic growth that has made modern life possible should reduce our labor needs over time. While there have been some reductions through the 19th and early 20th century, since 1938 we've been stuck at 40 hours a week.
The fact is, when a new labor saving device saves us from work, we have two choices: to work as much as we always did for more stuff, or to work less for the same amount of stuff. We have chosen the former.
We do all of this while sticking to the old scarcity paradigm in which we act as if we need to work all of the time in order to meet our needs to survive. Our society has become increasingly wealthy, and if we wanted to reduce our labor needs, we could. We would have a lower standard of living, but obviously some balance can be reached.
The greatest sin of all of this is that we still use poverty as a cudgel to keep people working in a perpetual state of artificial scarcity. We could solve poverty several times over by now. But we just keep insisting on linking income to work even to the point of threatening people with poverty for not working.
They then face a hostile labor market stacked against them. Workers outnumber the amount of jobs, people fall over each other trying to prove they're harder workers than everyone else applying for the same jobs. Pay is poor, working conditions are poor. For all of the regulations making our lives better they're only as good as the regulation themselves and the enforcement. Most workers live paycheck to paycheck and many can't even afforda $500 emergency. yes, we have cell phones and plasma tvs, but rent, healthcare, and education are unaffordable. For as much as we've grown, the wealth has mostly gone to the top 20% and especially the top 0.1%.
Our system is one in which we are slaves to the rich, as I said, the economy exists to serve human needs. We don't exist to serve it. but somewhere along the way (and let's face it it might've been designed this way) it turned into enslaving humanity to serve it. This should change.
So what are the solutions?
An economic bill of rights including a universal basic income, universal healthcare, free college/student debt forgiveness, a housing plan, and reducing the work week.
This should redistribute income/wealth, give people enough to give them more freedom from work, allowing the market to perform more like it should in theory, with voluntary exchange being a key part of it. Right now the voluntary part goes way. Workers are expected to give their labor, but employers are only required to do the state regulated minimum to give people a decent living, and it's not enough.
We should also seek to work less in general. its the 21st century. Why are we still sticking to the same work week we passed in 1938 when the economy was 1/6th of the size that it is now? Beyond that, universal healthcare, free college, and a housing program aim to resolve market failures that UBI itself will be insufficient at solving.
There can be other additions to this list, but this is what I could call my new new deal from the 21st century. Now to deal with the major moral objections to this.
Property rights aren't natural rights, and work isn't moral
Once again we tend to treat our moral systems all too often like strict matters of fact that were dictated by God. We see this directly with property rights. Property rights are so called "natural rights", as in, they were allegedly given to us by God. But as we saw in the previous article, divine command theory is nothing more than a lazy argument from authority.
All economic systems tend to resolve the questions of "who does what?" and "who gets what?" Who does the work, and who gets the benefit of the work? We tend to have this iron clad view that those who do the work are entitled to the fruits of the work, period. But this system was designed in a time of great scarcity, in which the consequences of someone not pulling their weight meant starvation would come in the winter.
Even more so, this system was developed out of the protestant work ethic, that linked work ethic with "virtue" and believed in institution a "no work no eat" policy in order to coerce people to adopt their christianity inspired sense of morality.
But, work is not a virtue under secularism. Work is just...a means to an end. It's what we need to do to make the stuff we need. If anything, I view work as an evil, not a calling. It is something that we should strive to eliminate over time.
In a world where labor is increasing less important, the link between work and labor should be less important. But it seems to me people value work for its own sake, believing we need to create more jobs in order to justify giving people a paycheck, because god forbid we just give people something "for free" (*audible gasps*).
The fact that people would audibly gasp is the problem. At what point are our institutions outdated? I would argue the second they themselves become the source of misery. And we are well past that point. Poverty is an artificial problem in the 21st century. The greatest barrier to solving it is not our material ability to solve it, it's the distribution to solve it. It's the reliance on jobs to solve it. Our economic system is cruel, and de facto slavery. We could have solved these issues decades ago, heck, people in the 1970s discussed UBI as a solution to poverty BACK THEN, and instead we went in the direction that gave us Ronald Reagan.
It is up to us, in the 21st century, to bring the mantle of progress forward, and to say "yeah maybe we should tax people to give us a UBI", maybe it would be a positive thing. Maybe it would enhance our well being and give us more liberty. Maybe we could have one of those techno utopias like we imagined we would in the mid 20th century. But it does involve getting over some of our current fixations on things like work, and being owed property as a natural right. Our institutions need to sometimes be reevaluated and updated to fit the problems of modern times. That which made sense 200 years ago may no longer make sense now. Maybe we should strive for a new system based on the problems of the day, rather than relying on the same old solutions. That does seem to be the issue with the modern day. We're trapped in all of these old ideologies with all of these old assumptions, because most of us have never thought past them. It's fine to stick with what works. But it's also find to change that which does not work, and if doing so leads to an objectively better world in terms of human well being and liberty, I would argue that NOT doing so is actually the immoral choice.
I feel like that really gets to the crux of what I want to say here.
The economy exists for people, not people for the economy.
Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
We should reevaluate our property rights system, obsession with growth, and work ethic, if we want to truly develop a solid 21st century the economy.
Plain and simple.
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