We do not live in capitalism; we live in Neo-feudalism, which is more strongly correlated with royalty fascism than the ideal of capitalism.
As envisioned by philosophers,
and,
as increasingly touted by the new age media in its ensuing application 1800s-present
the advantages of capitalism
are supposedly to be
to enable a higher standard of living to the mass populous
and to reward good ideas and good application. These are really the same aim:
Aim One: enable a higher standard of living to the masses —
How?
That is — how do we enable a higher standard of living to the mass populous, and, in fact further, how do we allow this standard to be ever raised, at, ideally, an accelerating pace?
What is standard of living?
Taking care of all physical needs — food, water, transportation, sanitation, clothing, shelter — and enabling more self-direction in the realization of higher individualized needs and wants engendered through the meeting of and therefore beyond these physical needs; creativity and further idea-generation once base needs are taken care of. Though applied unequally this has been the resultant of present known ‘capitalism’ — mass food, clothing and the like production, progressing to novelty entertainments.
Do we improve standard of living simply by giving more clothing, more food, and the like? From the survival stage, more is better — but only to a point, and, therefore, devoid of engendered-through-time technology: is it better to have enough bread not to starve at a greater tonnage, or to have a lesser tonnage of an equally distributed nutritious diet? The latter. But many, coming out of the survival stage, are too fear-ridden to do anything but take the former. More-ing is the instinctual response to survival, and we have not, as a mass, been conditioned out of it yet. In fact, the opposite: the advertisers have wanted us to continue our more-ing, as, lacking good ideas and good application, more-ing of the same is the only adequate way to rapidly improve the cashflow. Being that the ‘real’ assets — like real estate — have been carved up and monopolized by the few asset-holders, everybody is essentially born into debt; if not outright debt, into an inability to continuously base-line survive forwardly without making money. This has been touted as ‘a reality of life’. It is nothing of the sort, anymore; it may have been for most of human existence, circa 500,000 years ago to present. But, as of most recently — somewhere within only the last 50 years — it has absolutely and as a matter-of-fact ceased having to be you or me. With the money spent on entertainment per year, we could house — in their own house, one per person, not one per family — not even all of the world’s homeless, but all of the world’s inadequately housed. With half the money everyday spent servicing nuclear weapons, we could feed every hungry child on earth. We already produce more than enough food to adequately take care of everyone. In economics, we are supposed to have supply and demand: the demand for such life necessities is fixed and only changes in relation to population; the supply, most recently, has been adequately met. Somewhere specifically between 1970-1980, we met the point at which all basic needs of everyone on Earth (demand) could be taken care of with what was produced in the same time frame (supply). There must be a grave miscommunication — or intentional damming — of the flow to make the two forces suddenly incongruent. It is only the decisions of the leaders of earth — not just the big leaders, but the complicit decisions we all of us make everyday, from the mid-managers to the pay check-takers — that are allowing this situation to persist.
How did we realize a full — in fact, a surplus — supply to all of earth’s inhabitants, even as that number crossed what our ‘best minds’ listed as a full carrying capacity of our total systems — many times over — decades ago? How did we succeed? And how, despite the over-adequacy of supply and over-saturation of demand, are we failing to unite the two: to take care of everybody? How are we failing?
Let us return quickly back to the earlier question I raised: how is it possible to raise the standard of living, as a goal of hypothetical capitalism?
Is it only to produce more for each more-producing baby maker aboard the planet? When there are two people to conquer Earth, they can each have half if they agree that all can be taken care of. Now, we each can have only, at maximum, 1 eight billionth, with the number growing lesser. If that was the case, we would be extinct decades ago. People have been seriously — and rightly — foretelling the end of human society by simple atrophy of capacity since the 1920s. We’ve missed it every single time, in fact far exceeding the concerning maximum population point. The doom sellers were right at their time, but wrong when they caught up to their prediction. Why?
We often hear terrified cries about the expansion of material items in today’s world. In reality, we already reached the peak of this trend, and are now on the down-wave. In fact, we reached the peak some time ago. As Buckminster Fuller prophetically noted — and meticulously catalogued — in the 1940s, at that time (and since) the in-circulation amount of every major resource per person has been decreasing. That is, in 1940, there was more iron, coal, steel and the like on the markets per person than there was now. But — do we live better than in the 1940s? Our dietary fulfillment and indoor plumbing would suggest so; all measurable outcomes would.
How would we improve the performance with less input? It is a very simple equation, to which there is only one answer: phrase it however you like. We’ve invented, we’ve innovated, we’ve improved, we’ve gained efficiency. It is all the same: we have done more with less. And indeed, Buckminster Fuller charted that, at the microcosmic and the macrocosmic that was exactly what was happening. Macro: outcomes improved, less circulation of all materials per person. Micro: looking at specific units-based performance, we see the same: more energy is generated with less coal burned, more area enclosed more sturdily with less steel.
Capitalism, if it could only solve problems of standard of living by brute more-ing force, would run for a very short while indeed. Initiated amid the revolutions of the 1700s, it would not even have brought us indoor plumbing — a new invention unsuited to a more-ing now production-only system. The only way it can — and has been able to — meet its own ends is through the figuring out of ways to do more with less. You do not produce more doo-dads per person. Given the critical doo-dads, everyone only needs — or even can really have, so much. We all need a house, and even billionaires can only spend so much on housing. We all need food, and, even as our lifespans increase, the calories a human being can and will consume over a lifetime still hits a fixed maximum amount. If we are not to engage in trickery, and only give to people what they want or ask for, the needs of people for any given doo-dad — be it important, like food or water or shelter, or less important, like a music-making tool — are quite fixed. We do not improve the standard of living by making more doo-dads; we only improve the standard of living by figuring out how to make the desired number of doo-dads with less input at a higher standard. Even in the mass production of early industrialization, this was still the ever-present equation, we have only forgettingly reframed it. Getting mass car ownership was not at its first principle about mass producing them; /it was about designing them to a point that they could be mass produced/.
We see then how both aims are one in the same: to reward and thereby regeneratively incentivize good ideas and good application, and to improve the standard of living of the populous. The only way to accomplish the latter is through the former; the ever better figuring out — which is why we need a system whereby the figuring out is rewarded.
I do not prefer to use the term rewarded, but rather regeneratively accelerated. A reward is past-seeking. A regenerative continuing allowance is future-trending.
Capitalism is completely dependant on ideas for its function. But more broadly — and the reason its even limited application has led to improved outcomes — the whole basis of economic value whatsoever can ever and only be ideas.
Ideas and application. Application itself stems from the ideas — how to make the doo-dad is just as important a step as what the doo-dad is. Product and process are a whole and unit system. You cannot ever have one without the other.
“Real wealth is ideas plus energy.”
Here, I am quite confident he is using the physic-al definition of energy, being both matter and energy as per Einstein. Once again, not only is the Earth a sum-system, but the whole Universe is: matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be reconfigured. There is no /making/ in Universe, there is only /recycling/, in accordance with our human engendered design. We can never /lose/ physical materials or capability; we can only /lose/ usefulness of design for a given purpose.
Capitalism is derived from the word capital, meaning, broadly, input to the operation. Conventionally, there were understood to be only a few parts: labour, land, materials. The philosophers got it right in broadly considering the driving force of a system to be a feature which, when tasked with making or directing decisions, would enable positive outcomes. If capital, they said, would direct itself, it will do so, well. Brilliant. But, they got it dead wrong when identifying what exactly this feature was. What is capital?
I have a gold mine. It contains endless tonnes of gold. And yet, I am dirt poor. I have nothing to mobilize, and not even a plan for expansion or development. How is this possible? It is 100,000 years ago; I’ve made my camp above this gold mine, but don’t know what gold is, what it could be used for, or how to get it. And so, it is worthless. (This is why it is so important to be a comprehensivist: to look at the whole and not the parts. Too many people, even economists, are sitting in their own frame of reference, and cannot ponder, even at a subconscious level, a gold mine, or gold, or money, being worthless. The only sensible way to look at anything, at any level that can tell you anything, is 100,000 years out and 100,000 miles away.) Suppose, though, that, miraculously, I invent a process for converting dirt into a pill which would cure any ailment. My ‘dirt farm’ may become quite a ‘gold mine’ after all. Today, we are now awakening to the value of so-called intellectual property: ideas, books, code, plans, strategies, brands, concepts. As of 2002 75% of the sum value of the largest 500 companies in the world was pegged solely on intellectual property — intangible assets. It is also noticed that small businesses nearly almost undervalue their intellectual property, meaning, definitely, even by the sellers of the other systems and the asset-accounted, intellectual property officially became the largest resource on Earth even by their system within the last two decades. But the stark reality is, even in the age of great industrialization, there was never anything but intellectual property. All property, all trade-value, all assets of any kind are created strictly from ideas. A gold mine is only useful if you know the gold is there, how to get it out of the ground, and what to do with it. Coal is just a dead black rock until you know that it can be burned. And it is a much less useful burning fuel until you have not only the stove, but the steam engine.
Quick: Do this exercise, without looking anything up. Can you name who was Pope, anytime from 1400-1500? Or even 1300-1600? They surely would have been “the most powerful person in the world”. Can you name any of the great heads of the great city states, anywhere across Europe, from 1400-1500? Any of the wealthiest merchants? When I speak of this time period — who do you think of? I have given this problem now to many people, and have not had anyone yet name anyone other than DaVinci or Michelangelo. We think of — what do we call them? — the Renaissance men. The literal namesake for an entire era in history. And what did they do that was so monumental? More monumental than being “God’s ordained” world leader, the ruler of a military fleet, or a billionaire? DaVinci was the son of a slave with no formal education, sent to prison and to live in exile, struggling through poverty. But, he also scribbled ferociously in notebooks; he scribbled new ideas — not even published in his lifetime — that turned out to be worth a lot more than anything paid for or shipped by the merchants. The people we always remember history through — without even trying — are the inventors. Because they are the only people that bring value to human lives — they are the only ones capable of seeing and defining value. They are the ones with the ideas.