What's wrong with capitalism?
The first question.
One on one level, and this may strike you
as a bit contradictory, nothing's wrong with it.
And what do I mean?
I mean that it's working the way it always has.
It is pursuing profits.
The people who own and operate the businesses of the United States
(the factories, the offices, the stores) are looking to make a buck.
They're looking to save on their costs, expand their revenues, find new customers,
increase the prices so they get more revenues from their customers.
They're doing business the way they always have.
And the people benefiting the most?
Yeah, it's the same ones that always do in capitalism: the people at the top,
the people with the big bulk of shares, the shareowners,
the people those shareholders put in the top positions in companies-
the CEO, the CIO, the board of directors, the major executives at the top-
they're the ones with the big bucks taking them home.
They're the ones we read about living in those nice parts of town,
in those mansions, enjoying those vacations and all the rest.
And, you know, when they can make a buck
a bit easier, they take the steps needed to do that.
For example, they bring in the machines, the computers,
the robots, the artificial intelligence to make more money.
If that loses millions of people
their job, it's not the problem of the business community.
It's the problem of the people who've lost the job.
They're also the ones who move abroad if they can pay workers less
in China and India and Brazil or wherever.
They're the ones who push to have immigrants come in so they can pay them
less than they had to pay native Americans before.
Yeah, all of that is business as usual.
So when I say, what's wrong with capitalism, I want you to understand.
I'm not saying it's wrong in how it works.
I'm saying there's something wrong when it works as it's supposed to.
When it works in exactly the way it was set up.
Now, of course, occasionally people like me and others have been
critical of capitalism, more so this year than I have seen in my lifetime.
And that has led some of the leaders of our capitalist
enterprises to put on a kind of show.
I hope I'm not being unfair, but then again, who knows?
Here's what I mean by putting on a show.
They come up with ideas that they are going to now
run their businesses in a new way.
And here’s words we get like this:
We're going to have soulful corporations.
We're going to have conscious capitalism.
We're going to develop a new kind of corporation, a B corporation
that can be interested and concerned about society as well as making a profit.
We're going to have stakeholder capitalism and on and on.
They promise this capitalism will be more humane.
It won't destroy the environment the way it has.
It won't disregard the needs of its workers the way it has.
It won't evade its tax responsibilities the way they keep doing.
There are lots of promises, lots of words,
lots of brochures, lots of glitzy advertisement.
But has anything fundamental changed?
Not at all.
The same people are in charge.
The same people are making all the basic business decisions.
And guess what?
The problems that I listed at the beginning
are the product of what these businesses have been doing
with the same old leadership organized in the same old way.
Reforming capitalism, making it more sensitive...
It's been a good advertising pitch.
It has changed nothing.
Reform to capitalism is the same old story
in a slightly prettified package.
The basic story hasn't changed.