by Jon Rappoport
“An era of corruption is built for those who lead corrupt lives. They revel in the era. They belong. They are home. They don’t care what you call the prevailing system, they’ll find their way, because they know the unspoken rules and how things actually work. Naïve idealists and academic hair-splitters? The corrupt eat them for breakfast.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
The recent acceleration of attacks on capitalism leaves no ground un-scorched. Whatever capitalism is, it’s all bad. It needs to be banned. A wiser and saner alternative must be found—and naturally that alternative will be handed down from Above, where wondrous altruists in government can point us toward the Promised Land.
For the sake of humanity, they will assume the reins of power. They’ll organize businesses and companies and corporations under the umbrella of government, and all will be well.
Forget the fact that they cooperate and collude and conspire and commit crimes with their erstwhile corporate and banking partners. That’s a minor footnote.
Merriam-Webster defines capitalism as: “an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.”
Boiling it down further: you start a company; you own the company; you make a product and you sell it at a price you determine. People buy the product if they choose to.
This arrangement is not evil. You could turn it into a criminal enterprise, if you wanted to. For example, you could make a product that is poison, advertise it as medicine, and pay off those who might expose your ruse. But in that case, you’ve perverted the primary capitalist arrangement.
You would be prosecuted, if discovered. Well, you would be, if law-enforcement personnel were honest. If they weren’t, you could get away with murder.
Now, suppose there are 10,000 companies who do get away with murder. Suppose, to take things further, there are governments who collude with some of these companies and go to war, against other nations, so the companies can obtain access to raw materials they want, in order to manufacture their products.
Is this conspiracy an intrinsic part of capitalism? Is it? Or is it a perversion of the basic capitalist arrangement?
Some would argue that capitalism naturally breeds this perversion, and therefore it is an evil system. But that argument has a flaw. In order to propose it, you need to assume there are a fairly large number of people, in significant positions, who will commit crimes and enable crimes, on an ongoing basis.
And if so, those criminals will pervert any economic system in which they participate. Socialism, Communism, Fascism, State Corporatism, and so on. Therefore, any economic system will turn out to be evil.
Those “idealists” who rail against capitalism are, at best, railing against criminals. They tend to ignore the fact that law-enforcement personnel fail to punish criminals. This is, and always was, the problem.
Capitalism isn’t the problem.
For example, in the early days of the American Republic, state legislatures, fearing the power of corporations, adopted stringent rules: every corporation doing business in a state had to be charted by the legislature; and any corporation doing harm to the public would have its charter yanked. It would be kicked out of the state.
But this state system was eventually swallowed up by corrupt legislators, judges, and corporate criminals.
Do you really want to believe that these states, if they adopted socialism, would have eliminated those criminals?
I’m not even bothering to make the argument that capitalism fosters greater achievement and freedom than socialism. I’m just talking about criminals.
A society in which a large number of people were awake, intelligent, and courageous would directly face the question: what do we do about criminals? How do we ferret them out, how do we prosecute them, how do we keep them from being protected, how do we keep them from gaining too much power?
Abject failure in that regard guarantees the corruption of any political and economic system. Only addled fools would assume that “a more just system” would correct the underlying problem.
When I say “criminal,” in this context, I’m talking about Wall Street thieves; makers of harmful products; bureaucrats who protect harmful products and their producers; legislators who bring pork to their districts; bankers who invent money out of thin air; corporate monopolists who crush their competition; corporate leaders who promote, through their government cronies, wars and invasions; academics and researchers who lie about science in order to elevate corporate profits; egregious polluters; government/corporate partners who destroy jobs at home and set up shop in foreign lands, where slaves work in unconscionable conditions; governments that expand the bloat of their work-forces for no good reason…and so forth and so on.
The levels and extent of corruption are extraordinary, yes. Because, over a very long period of time, criminals have been nurtured, protected, aided, and secretly declared immune from prosecution.
This is not capitalism. This is endemic corruption, and if you need an example from the annals of socialism, examine the old USSR.
It’s all too easy to say there is no solution and the human race is doomed. I’ve known many such critics, and they all exhibit a grim passivity coated with self-serving cynicism. Under cover of “knowing the score,” they’re making excuses for their own misery.
The answer lies in raising children who are honest; who are smart; who are genuinely educated; who are beyond the fatal flaw of buying into the latest flimsy fly-by-night idiot’s-delight idealism; who will stand up for their principles; who believe in individual power and responsibility; who don’t see the benefit of turning into chronic low-level liars; who are liberated from whining and moaning; who refuse to go along with the crowd; who mix and mingle with enough life-as-it-is to avoid becoming androids and robots; who can spot con artists and shuck-and-jive altruists at a thousand yards; who see what criminals at all levels are doing to those around them; who have the imagination to envision a different world…
And that takes a certain kind of parent.
That is not the responsibility of the State. It doesn’t take a village. It doesn’t take a politician with “a better answer.” It doesn’t take paralyzing fear. Or surrender. Or fairy tales and rainbows.
It takes individuals. Each one unique. Each one alive and awake. Each one rejecting the decaying nature of criminals. Criminals in the street, criminals in the halls of government, criminals in the boardrooms.
No excuses. No rationalizations.
