Rethinking capitalism

It's a well-known fact that political buzzwords thrown around today to describe different political ideologies do not correspond to reality. Words like Socialist, Nazi, Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, Communist, Anarchist, Totalitarian, and Fascist are all used to malign someone's image in a certain way. People try to use these buzzwords to try and discredit someone's argument. For example, "WE can't have a public option cuz that's Socialist." Calling it Socialist immediately makes it explicit that the policy about which we are debating cannot work for Amerikkka because it is fundamentally against our way of life and traditional American values.

That's why today I wanted to talk about another word: capitalism. Libertarians and Republicans have a very different understanding about the way in which capitalism is supposed to function. Republicans, as believers in Reagan's agenda, posit that capitalism is merely self-interested parties trying to accrue duckets by any means necessary. For Republicans (and Democrats too), being a big corporation implies that that corporation exerts a lot of influence in Washington. In other words, mixing politics and the economy is okay.

For Libertarians, the free market should remain "free" in the sense that no one should exert undue influence on the market such that another individual is not free to start a competing proprietorship or corporation. This means that no one company can become so large as to completely dominate a sector of the economy. According to Libertarians, this usually happens when a corporation tries to mix with government to get special favors or dispensations.

So, to clarify, the Republican conception of capitalism couldn't be farther off from what Libertarians believe. Republicans are big believers in corporations like Enron, who pretty much became so large that they created their own private markets or dominated the ones that were already in existence. They thrive on corporate handouts, and the Citizens United ruling probably made them want to go out and dance in the street. I hate when Republicans tout "free market ideals", as if those were synonymous with the version of capitalism to which Republicans actually subscribe. It's time for Republicans to own up to the fact that they're not really pro-free-market at all. If anything, they're against the free market the most. Was it not Adam Smith who postulated that capitalists are the worst for the free market, because they are the ones who look to profit by any means necessary?

People are confused by economic and political terms. It doesn't help that the Republicans throw around buzzwords so that it appears that they support free-market principles when in fact they hate the free market. It is reminiscent of 1984, where the language itself becomes so muddled and "refined" that if people start to hear pro-capitalist rhetoric couched in terms of the "free market," people will start to think that increases in numbers of House/Senate Republicans will correlate to how free the market is, when in fact it's just the opposite.