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FREE ENTERPRISE CAPITALISM AS THE FAILED CONQUEROR - ABOUT THE ENVIRONENT
Poorer nations need to recognize that they are a bigger problem. Their population growth tends well beyond locally sustainable levels and their massive export of people is no longer acceptable in an environment sensitive and conscious world. Every nation needs to conserve arable lands and natural environments against population growth. We still lack population control, and in some instances, reduction, treaties, and we still lack proper immigration treaties, balancing the numbers so that groups and nations that are practicing reproduction as a form of conquest, and as a means to produce a human product intended for export, are forced to change their attitudes. Deliberate and ignorant reproduction of an excess to locally sustainable levels has to be seen as an aggressive, violent, act, and made unacceptable in the world community. The idea of “human capital” in poor nations needs to be altered. It is an old idea, but no longer valid in the today’s world with an overburdened planet approaching or perhaps exceeding the 10 billion level. The idea that the world can and should be conquered by unfettered reproduction must be completely ended. Local sustainable levels should be considered as levels where a reasonable standard of living can be achieved by all, with a reasonable but not excessive level of economic development. We must also keep in mind that overcrowding and excessive struggle for scarce resources does create conflict. It also breeds terrorism and extremism. That too includes the same principles of programming with an ideology, and then exporting to invade and conquer, except the methods are more aggressive and less social.
On the other hand free enterprise faithful rich nation led capitalism has utterly failed to find ways to do the necessary in every area of human life, when it comes to the good of the people.
The ideological legacy of the Cold War extremist dialectic of communism versus capitalism, seen as a battle to the death of good against evil, continues to be a major obstacle.
This has led to a number of more specific obstacles related to progress in environmental issues.
1). Private free enterprise funding for research and development is largely limited to low risk, high probability of financial return with profit margin, science. That system of fiscal accounting, placing expectations of profit ahead of human need narrowly limits science to very specific activities.
2). In the most rabidly free enterprise countries there is a strong reluctance against creating nationalized research establishments, and relatively poor funding of academic research which again is co-opted for either defense or profit oriented work. Research for the good of the people is again compromised. Reliance on purely chanced on spin offs from that type of research tends to be the rule, not the exception. After all, the fact that something will make a profit, or will improve defense of it, does not necessarily say that it is good for the environment. It often isn’t.
The creation of national laboratories, and scientific think tanks, freed from the politics and economics of free enterprise for profit restraints is the only logical way to go. That way you can provide the best facilities to the best minds, without having them compete with each other in what often becomes a wasteful reinventing of the wheel, due to the fellow who originally invented it keeping it a closely guarded secret.
3). It also frees researchers from the constraints that bias scientific data. In the current emphasis on free enterprise research, and competition for dollars, truth in science suffers immeasurably. Only nationalized R&D has a chance at achieving a greater level of truth. Marketing research to biased and self serving investors is not the road to purity, but it is a deal with the devil that R&D has continually and increasingly had to make.
4). For profit, free enterprise, industries, in many instances cannot afford to do the necessary to modernize factories and processes. The cost of modernization either exceeds the margins available, or the push for maintaining margins and increasing them is such that the investment is simply not possible. This is worse in developing nations, and in post Cold War eastern Europe. It is also worse in China, where American accounting has invaded and conquered a society which then has been rendered unable to look after the environment within a traditional American model of fiscal “responsibility” forcing environmental irresponsibility. You cannot have both, American free enterprise accounting and environmental responsibility. That is proven impossible in most of the developing world. The investors in globalized, free enterprise, will not hear of it, and do not support it. The statistics are clearly damning.
This includes such things as making certain that the best stack scrubbers that can be made are on every industrial smoke stack in the entire world. Forget the cost. Simply do it. If the economic system does not support that action, change the economic rules so that it can be done. The economic rules are the least important factor, but their effect has become a false dictatorship contrary to real and immediate needs.
Similarly replacing older oil fired, and all brown coal burning electric generating facilities. Where they exist it is considered impossible, under the existing free enterprise capitalist system, but you have to do it, so you again have to do something outside of those fiscal rules. The rules don’t matter. Replacing those energy production methods does matter. So you find a way to do it, and bend the rules accordingly. Something capitalism is not very good at. It has largely failed at any real pragmatism, other than understanding pragmatism in purely profit margin terms. The latter is a road to a mass grave, not a road to prosperity and human well being.
5). Products that are good for the environment and can solve environmental issues are not necessarily economical to manufacture within the existing system. Also they have to compete with very economical products that offer no environmental value in comparison. They often cost more to make. Processes for manufacturing that are environmentally more viable cost more. In free enterprise capitalism that is the ultimate deciding factor, more often than not. So it becomes the economic system and its beliefs that has to be put into question, if progressive change on environmental issues is to be achieved in any reasonable extent of time. In some instances this means that the good cannot be achieved without extensive subsidies, provided from innovative methods of funding. For instance, nationalizing an industry and using its profits to support the good of the many rather than the self interest of the very few. You cannot use that mechanism in free enterprise capitalism, but you can use it in another, hybrid, system.
6). Conservation and preservation of natural environments has long suffered from free enterprise, capitalist profit oriented, greed. Value, within the rules of the system as it exits, is profit, not conservation so conservation continually loses nearly every battle. The rules have to be changed, and the values changed along with them. That applies to value for arable lands, as well as for preservation of natural areas. Both are under siege. That the rules of an economic system have become dictatorial of all values, is particularly disturbing and dangerous. We have to remember that we cannot replace what is lost. In many instances it would take centuries, if ever.
7). Let us not forget that capitalist free enterprise often has a very ambivalent and destructive attitude to small enterprises and entrepreneurial pursuits. It likes to destroy them, to teach the lesson that big corporate enterprises are the only true and viable value. Isolating, demeaning, and disparaging, the individual and small group is epidemic in today’s capitalist system. That is partly to crush innovation that is seen as dangerous. After all there is that parable of the little mustard seed that grew into something. Well, make the ground infertile so that it cannot grow, and threaten the behemoths with its differing. In some ways that process has become a widespread and uncritically accepted fact, and it also has profound effects on matters concerning the environment. If big corporate isn’t doing it, likely it cannot be done, and certainly it should not be done, has increasingly been adopted into the rules of the system. It becomes a system of rules that includes rules about teaching failure, and that uses social divisive strategies to prevent successes at the grass roots level.
In conclusion, although we have only touched upon the subject, and there are many other more specific areas that can be delved into, we see that the Cold War ideological mentality as the most significant barrier that has prevented environment and many other forms of needed progress. The subsequent globalization of free market and free enterprise capitalism remains an aggressive act, of the conquering power, against other nations and all other systems of economic and social organization. It asserts its own rules and beliefs above all others, and claims spiritual right and truth for itself. Such hubris used to be considered punishable by the gods, and perhaps it is.
What the conqueror is doing would be alright, if the aggression were proving successful in terms of leadership to a truly better world, with truly better provision for the good of the world’s people. That, however, is something we cannot see in the actual results. There is too much damage from that aggression, and the damage is continually growing worse. There is too much damage, in particular, to the ability of the conquered and the conquerors as to their being able to achieve the needed without being excessively constrained by a system of what are proving to be wastefully dysfunctional beliefs and rules. We see that in issues concerning the environment, ane the deadlock as to means to solutions. In fact that dysfunctional system, with its inability to change and to adopt innovations that stand outside of its own beliefs, is threatening long term human survival and the quality of life of every person on Earth. Clearly the conqueror must then be conquered, to stop the perishing. The hubris must be punished, and if the Greeks were right in their ideas, it will be punished, most severely.
Robert Morpheal
This article may be copied, distributed, reproduced, in any form, by any means, anywhere, and in fact anyone is encouraged to do so.
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