Capitalism: The End Of The Race

Good Morning Reader,

Capitalism was a genius idea. At it's core you harness people's nature to compete and excel and by allowing them to compete you ensure a high level of productivity. It encourages high levels of economic growth, satisfaction for people who work hard and reward for people who innovate.

To allow capitalism to flourish requires a free market. Unfettered by government or irrational intervention. The problem with these kinds of intervention is that they restrict capitalism and run the risk of destroying the reward of capitalism; if you innovate and work hard you might still get nothing and then people lose faith in capitalism and the whole system breaks down.

However for some time I have considered capitalism to have a flaw that it seems to me that not many people have identified. When people are competing eventually someone wins. That winner then receives the prizes and rewards which give them an edge in the next race. To use an analogy capitalism is like putting everyone in a running race. The runners do their thing and at the end the top 3 get medals and recognition. But that's not all they get, other people see their talent and want to invest in them. They get support including expert training, better equipment and as a result a better chance at winning in the next race. In the market it's exactly the same thing. The purpose of capitalism is to get everyone to work as hard as they can and innovate as much as possible and when one group or business does so they make more money and gain more resources. They get better applicants wanting to work with them, can buy better equipment and offer better services meaning they continue to pull further ahead of the rest of the competition. It's then only natural for them to absorb some of their competitors where they can and suddenly you have less of a free market and more of an oligopoly where only a few of the best remain.

So how do you get everyone to compete in a competition where nobody wins but people still try their hardest? Any parent with a child at one of these new fangled weekend football events where they don't keep score can tell you that people don't try their hardest. Balanced situations (as we have in most Western nations today) where you try to keep markets relatively free but with government controls to protect the spirit of the competition also have frequent problems. For now there is no solution. The only one I can see would require people to genuinely start believing in doing what they can for the good of our species.