One of the charter documents for U.S. capitalist plutocracy is Milton Friedman's 1970 NYT essay, "The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." Friedman argued that the only "social responsibility" of corporate executives, as employees of investor-owners, is "to conduct the business in accordance with [the owners'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom."
Of course, Friedman knew that corporations are run by humans who may be tempted to make money in ways that harm society (such as polluting waterways or making unsafe products). He blithely assured us that even huge corporations such as GE or Exxon Mobile (with revenues larger than those of many nations) can be held in check by law and "ethical custom." This foolish argument ignores the increasing role of corporate financing in electing the legislators who make laws. It also assumes that the same people whose "only social responsibility" is investor profits will nevertheless have a strong enough moral code to accept the constraints of "ethical custom." Friedman's argument was a striking proof that having a Nobel Prize in Economics is no guarantee of wisdom.
In the 50 years since Friedman's essay, corporate-funded legislators have greatly reduced tax rates on upper-income individuals and on corporations, on capital gains, dividends and inherited wealth. As Bloomberg reported in October, after years of decline, America's middle class (the middle 60% of U.S. households by income) now for the first time in history holds a smaller share of U.S. wealth than the top 1%. Even in 2019, before the enormous profits billionaires gained during the pandemic, 3 billionaires in the U.S. - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined. Money is power. The dominance of the investor class has never been greater.
On January 10, 2010, the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission further consolidated our capitalist plutocracy by ruling that corporations can now spend unlimited funds on campaign advertising if they are not (wink wink) formally "coordinating" with a candidate or political party. The investor class has the loudest, most pervasive voice in our society, lulling us into assenting to their rule and voting for their politicians.
As an illustration of the absurdity of letting capitalists run our society, consider our broken healthcare system. At his website Systemic Disorder, Pete Dolack argues that "The United States spends more than $1.4 trillion per year than it would otherwise if it had a single-payer system." He arrives at this figure by starting with two numbers: (1) $4,392, the average per capita cost of healthcare in Britain, Canada, France and Germany for the years 2011 to 2016 and (2) $8,924, the average for the U.S. during the same period. The difference between these two numbers is $4532, which he multiplies by the U.S. population to get the $1.4 trillion. The argument by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden that Medicare for All is too costly is a cruel lie that contributes to needless death and suffering in the U.S.
On Aug. 4 of this year, The Commonwealth Fund published a report ranking the healthcare systems of 11 high-income nations. It concluded that the U.S. (after 10 years of Obamacare) ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. In fact, the authors say that the U.S. did so poorly that they left it out in calculating average performance in the 4 domains. In the other countries, government closely regulates and administers the funding and delivery of healthcare, making sure there no cost barriers to universal access, bargaining with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, and avoiding the administrative burden that providers in the U.S. have in dealing with multiple competing for-profit insurance corporations.
Organizing basic social services around profit-making creates absurdities everywhere. We have health insurance companies that profit by rejecting as many claims as possible, and creating preferred-provider networks that often block patients from seeing the specialist they need. Private for-profit prisons and migrant detention centers try to cut cost costs by feeding prisoners low quality food and providing inadequate climate control and insufficient medical staff. For-profit schools spike their profits by paying too little to get good instructors and squeezing out special-needs students.
American capitalism is indifferent to the well-being of its workers. As Pete Dolack reports in Counterpunch+, "Among the 42 countries that are members of the OECD and/or the European Union, there is only one country with zero paid days of vacation or holiday under the law: the United States. Among those countries, only two, Turkey and the United States, have no holidays with mandatory pay." The U.S. is the only country with no mandatory paid vacation days. The next worst, Turkey, has 12. American workers have no mandatory paid maternity leave. Other nations offer at least 14 weeks. Only the U.S., Papua New Guinea and a few tiny island nations offer none.
Establishment Democrats and their media allies praise Biden for his job creation. They point out that the unemployment rate has declined from 6.3% in January to 4.2% in November. As MSNBC political commentator Steve Benen put it last month, "By any fair measure, that's a success story Americans can and should feel good about." Why doesn't Biden get credit for this?
But the unemployment rate, like the GDP, is an abstraction that leaves out much of what American workers experience. The official unemployment rate of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts people as employed even if they are unwillingly employed only part-time. The Ludwig Institute's website has developed what it calls the True Rate of Unemployment. Using data compiled by the BLS, it
"tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes."
A decent society should not count wage slaves as "employed." For 2021 the Institute calculates the True Unemployment Rate at 23.6%, 5.6 times greater than the official BLS rate of 4.2%.
To call something an "end" is to say that it is desirable for its own sake. Justice, peace and the general welfare are the ends of society, goals with intrinsic value. Money and wealth have no intrinsic value; they are purely means, only as good as the ends they are used for. GDP growth, however great, is still a means, not an end. Unlimited economic growth in an era of global warming is insane. Social progress comes from improving the economy, which is very different from growing it.
Capitalism is a lie because it subordinates ends to means, inherent value to derivative value. To subordinate the function and goals of law-making (i.e. government) to the capitalist goal of making "as much money as possible" is irrational and has bent society out of shape.
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