Op-Ed: How Covid-19’s Impact Might Be Good for the United States · 8:26pm Apr 16th, 2020
Hello readers! I’m going to start this post with a bit of a disclaimer. Two, actually.
First, I know Covid-19 has been bad for a lot of people. It’s caused a lot of deaths, and a lot of disruption. There are people who have lost family members and friends because of this, or jobs and livelihoods. At the time of this writing, the global death toll was about 140,000. The goal of this post isn’t to say that Covid-19 (AKA Coronavirus) is good, it’s unmistakably a situation which we should take very seriously. But the impact it’s left on the other claw, could be good. Much in the way an early architectural disaster arising due to unknown elements can lead to a greater understanding of building stresses and safer buildings overall (this has indeed happened).
Second, this post is really only concerned with the United States of America. Because it’s where I happen to live, and where therefore I’m both most familiar with the structure of things as well as the effects Covid-19 has had on that structure. If you’re one of my many readers from outside the US (shoutout to Europe, including Sweden, Norway, Spain, and Finland, New Zealand, Brazil, and even Africa!) then this post may not be quite as relevant except maybe as a curious thought exercise or puzzlement or another opinion piece on how the US functions (or in this case, doesn’t function, as we’re about to discuss).
So, with both those things said, then, let’s move on to today’s post, and how Covid-19’s impact could be good for the US … if we’re aware enough to make it happen.
You know, this would be a lot easier if say, rather than being owned by shareholders, companies were owned by their employees, who could then democratically vote on their leadership.
The only thing I have to add is that I seriously question if this bailout from the government is a good thing. In fact, I'd say it's spectacularly bad. What does this bailout teach us? That it doesn't matter if we aren't fiscally responsible. Why should we or the businesses be fiscally responsible when we know Uncle Sam with his infinite bank account will pay us to stay afloat?
Granted, these companies folding would be nothing short of devastating for all involved. But if you're just going to pick them up every single time they fall, how in God's name can we ever expect anyone to learn not to fall in the first place? If we're going to bail businesses out, it should be conditional to them cleaning up their financial act rather than just "Here, free money!"
5243825
I agree. Especially the airlines, who were flagrantly dismissive about why they didn’t have any money and fully expected that they’d just be given a handout with no questions asked.
Let them fail! Does anyone really think that within minutes of them announcing that they were going out of business, someone else wouldn’t show up to buy it all and prove they could run it better? It’d be disruptive, yes, but it’d be truer to the idea of “capitalism” than the bailout we gave them was.
If you’re going to adopt a system, you have to take the good with the bad.
Now, in fairness, corporations have worked their hardest to build a system whereby they’re insulated from that. Making everyone’s retirement based on stock prices, rather than a pension, for example, makes them “too big to fail” as if they do, everyone loses their retirement. They’ve leveraged that as a tool to insulate themselves from their behavior and mistakes, and that needs to change.
5243822
Some companies do this, and to everyone's "shock" it does work pretty well. Look at Winco. There are drawbacks with the advantages, but it's definitely worth looking at.
At the very least, I suggest every employee, bottom to top, should count as an "investor" for the purposes of meetings and whatnot, because as people working in the company, stock or not, their lives are invested in it.
As someone living in a country with a statistically negligible death toll, I hope countries being hit hard take a note or two about preventative measures so that this doesn't happen again (and it *will*, eventually)
Ho-lee crap. I'd forgotten about how fiduciary responsibility laws worked, and never realized things were this bad. I mean, I knew something wasn't right when the richest man in the world counts on his employees being on welfare (and, y'know, asking for charitable donations to help pay them), so it's not completely out of left field, but wow.
Also learned today that there are explicitly different cultivars of capitalism.
So, how do we, the people, effect some positive change here? And what is humanist capitalism?
5244308
I'm no economist nor philosopher, but having thought about this at length... I don't think there is such a thing.
There are degrees, sure, but capitalism generally relies on exploiting workers by paying them less than the value of the product they create. Without paying the workers less than value, then the company can't turn a profit, and without a profit the company can't expand, and without expansion a company is condemned to perish, because there will always be another company willing to exploit its workers more in order to make a larger profit. It's a vicious, predatory evolutionary cycle, and humans as individuals cannot evolve to compete with companies.
The best a capitalist company can do, ethically, is exploit its workers as little as possible, which means that the company must be committed to extremely slow, sustainable, long-term growth. Say goodbye to +20% quarterly profit margins. Obviously, companies like this usually don't get investors because investors only care about growth and profit, so we're back in the same cycle.
Now there are businesses which operate on the worker-owned model. A good typical example are things like so-called "anarchist coffee shops" where a simple barista can make $50,000+ a year because they're receiving the market value of the product they produce. The workers, not a boss or investor, decide how the company should be run and how much they want to invest in promoting growth.
But that's not capitalism. It's communism. Pretty much any way you slice it, "ethical" or "humanist" capitalism ends up looking a helluva lot like communism. But as we've seen, communism doesn't work from the top down (coughUSSR andChinacough). It can only work from the bottom up, implemented by workers, for workers. Unfortunately... people are people and money is a strong motivator for exploitation.
5244308
The first step? Kind of a tricky one, but I think the first step is awareness. Get people aware that things aren't just "the way they are and that's it." That they've changed before, many times, and can change again. Once people are aware and educated, many of them will be the change as they move into positions of impact.
Second, as they become more aware they'll be able to question politicians or leaders that say the opposite (either out of hopeful ignorance or deliberate malfeasance), bring them to task, and then walk away to support those with better views, ideas, or definitions.
But education is definitely the first step, followed by the realization that no, just because "it's always been like this" is a terrible explanation and excuse. And it really hasn't "always been like this." It's changed to be like it, and it can (and should) change again.
As far as humanist capitalism goes, there are a varying degree of definitions (as well as names, for example Andrew Yang is a proponent of "Human-centered capitalism," which is slightly different) but they grow out of the idea that a company has obligations to the people of the society it functions in (for example, these could be its own employees or the people buying its products, or both) and the environment it operates in.
Personally I lean toward something that's more heavily rooted in (and prepared for) the impact of automation. Automation capitalism, maybe? I'm a firm believer that companies should look to the welfare of all involved, employees included, but I haven't settled on any iron-clad "This is what it must be."
5244342
That is not how capitalism works, nor is it how capitalism functions, and anyone who taught you contrary (book or person) should be slapped post-haste.
Capitalism is a free-trade system wherein private individuals control trade and industry and have the choice of how to move in that sector. That's it. And that doesn't mean "exploiting" their workers at under value. If you truly think that, then you do not understand capitalism. Instead it's about the freedom to use techniques and capabilities to sell a product that you can produce easier (or better) than anyone else to then sell or exchange for more than you put into it, that others are willing to pay because they lack the means to do so at a lower cost.
Example: Pretzels. Have you ever made pretzels. It's actually quite easy. And cheap. Save for one little problem: TIME. Pretzels take a vast amount of time, even if the labor is easy and the ingredients cheap. Result without capitalism? Pretzels are a delicacy few have the time to make, being busy with other things. TIME is the chief cost they cannot pay.
Along comes a baker. They realize that in a place with 1000 people who want pretzels, if he spends the time (1 day) to make a large batch of 100 pretzels, he can sell each pretzel to one of those 1000 people, charging $2 a piece. The pretzel ingredients for 100 pretzels only cost $5, the real investment being time. But if he sells 100 pretzels at $2 a piece, then he's made $200, minus the $5, and the remaining $195 pays for his time.
Now others can buy pretzels with their money (accumulated in exchange for time elsewhere) at low cost comparatively to themselves (a few minutes of their time instead of a day). And the baker, who doesn't mind spending that time in exchange, makes a profit.
And if his prices get to high someone else can try and invest their time to best them. Or comes along with a technique that makes pretzels in half the time, and so the market shifts. It's open enough that anyone can try.
That's capitalist economics, via pretzels. Sure, someone could be browbeaten into working for even less, forced by virtue of no other option, but that's not capitalism (and is far closer to pure communism).
EDIT: For further reading, examine how Henry Ford (and other 20th century employers) proved that the most successful capitalist businesses were those that overpaid their employees, rather than underpaid. Sands, Disney made an entire movie that had this as one of its theme (Christopher Robin) a few years ago, exploring the post-WWII note that "when everyone is lifted, everyone goes up" wherein the protagonist saves the company he's working for by increasing wages and offering paid vacations ... enticing the employees to use the company's own products at large.