She loads the last box into her old pickup. She looks around at her now empty home. Choked, she tells her 3yr old daughter to say goodbye to the house she has grown up in. She then turns to the man in the suit and hands him the keys to the house. He presents a paper for her to sign. A tear drops onto the paper and smears the ink as she signs away her home to the bank. When her husband walked out her part time pay couldn’t cover the expenses of a child and a home, and when 90 days passed the bank came calling. Now she is condemned to living in her truck until she can get back on her feet.
In a country as wealthy, powerful and advanced as the United States of America, one glaringly obvious question begs to be answered, why are so many of our people forced to go hungry, homeless, sick, cold and unsafe? We live in a time that we can look at the tiniest atom and see into the farthest reaches of our solar system yet we cannot even support our own people. Sickness and disparity ravage the poor, insecure and ill fed as the giant mechanical wheels of Capitalism coldly turn and grind the underachievers into the ground. And why should we support them? Are we not told from the beginning that we must do our best in school if we want to have a good life, that just good enough is not good enough? This is America damn it! We are powerful strong and unyielding, and if you can’t handle it then you can get out!
For as long as I can remember I have been told that Capitalism is the only way, the crowning achievement of a nation that began as poor immigrants leaving Britain’s tyranny to establish a better world, that you can go as far as you want so long as you work for it. And hell, I one hundred percent agree, the only limitations on your life are the ones you put upon yourself. A poor man can become rich and a rich man poor, it all settles on what they put into it. But what happens when that idea gets too big? What happens when cold efficiency forgets about the people that are the back bone of this nation? When saving a buck means a family will have to go without? What happens when Capitalism gets taken over by the greedy and power is wrested from the hands of the many and put into the hands of the few?
Wal-Mart has long been the picture of Capitalism at work. Wal-Mart moves into your town, and the small businesses move out. They offer cheap products for those who can’t afford boutique shop prices. They offer jobs to those displaced by their overtaking of the local market and they tell us that they are a force for good, providing jobs and cheap products for the everyman. Look at it, Wal-Mart is an amazing machine, they come in, over saturate the market with their cheaper products, and with their considerable money and clout push out their competitors. It is Capitalism at its finest. At what point though, is it not a solution for debt but actually an unending cycle to keep us in debt? When broken down your can see the inherent problems within.
First, when Wal-Mart comes to town they provide cheaper products that everyone needs and uses on a daily basis. Products such as hygienic care, food, clothing and household necessities are provided at a cheaper rate. Boutique shops therefore are undercut and since they don’t have the capital that Wal-Mart has they are eventually forced to close. That in turn displaces the workers and owners of the boutique shops. And where do they go for work? To Wal-Mart of course, that is the only place hiring. So they accept the pay decrease just to have work. Now they make less money than before so they need to make every penny count, and where else to go than the super cheap megastore that they are employed by? So now they receive a paycheck from the Waltons, and then turn right around and put that money right back into the business that they work for. Now they have the things necessary to live but their quality of life has dropped considerably due to lack of funds for other activities such as travel and entertainment. So ensues a vicious cycle created to keep pumping the profits back into the company that created it.1
Furthermore, to ice the profit cake, Wal-Mart and many other large companies, also partakes in the controversial practice of “Dead Peasant” Policies. (Their words, not mine.2) The basic idea of a “Dead Peasant Policy” is when a company takes out a life insurance policy in the name of one of their employees in case of an untimely death on the unlucky employee’s part. And when that death does happen they collect the insurance policy and become that much richer, while not paying a single cent of it to the bereaved widow or widower. Case point: As stated by film maker Michael Moore in the 2009 documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, about “a grieving husband whose wife, a cake maker at Wal-mart, died of asthma. Her "dead peasants" policy - "dead peasants" being the actual language used in the corporate memo Moore obtained - gave not a penny to the family she left behind but made Wal-mart richer by $81,000.”3
So this leads to a few more questions about how America and its companies function and what moral codes should they adhere to. In the Op-Ed piece in the New York Times in 2005 titled “Don’t Blame Wal-Mart,”4 Robert B. Reich explores the dichotomy of America’s consumer culture today. He finds that the major problem doesn’t just lie within Wal-Mart but within our collected selves. And how is that one may ask? Well it’s simple really: When an average consumer goes shopping what are they looking for? The best deal right? So when they are searching for the best deal and the lowest price they don’t think about where the products came from or who made them or who benefits from their purchasing of said items. They just want a good deal. So, places like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and other large corporations provide those cheap prices and good deals. And where does that leave the specialty boutique shops? Out of sight, out of mind and out of business. And therein lies our problem, we want the best deals yet we want our economy to be strong.
So where does this leave us? American Capitalism has obviously failed us, so where do we turn? Many young Americans jump at that question with a resounding SOCIALISM! So then what is Socialism? Socialism is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as: “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”5 That definition can be rather vague and slightly complicated to understand. In more basic terms the idea of Socialism is that of an economic structure that focuses on distributing the goods evenly across everyone, instead of an economic structure that is set up to make some rich while leaving others poor and without basic needs being fulfilled. Now, one can immediately see some pitfalls of this system. What about the bums, the people that do not and will not contribute to society that will feed off the system taking from those of us who have worked hard for what we have? What about the people who work hard and try to get ahead? Does a system like this not promote advancement in all fields, the idea being that if I don’t get more money from new ideas then why waste time coming up with them? All these are inherent problems with Socialism. So, what is to be done then? Capitalism rapes the poor, Socialism rapes the hard working, so then what can we do?
Well the economic structure of Social-Capitalism addresses that problem. Social-Capitalism is the idea of taking the benefits of both systems and putting them together to form a stronger, healthier, better society. How can this be achieved? Are they not forever pitted against one another do to their polar opposition? Well by taking the good of Capitalism, the idea that if you work hard you can achieve more and get ahead in life, and take the good of Socialism, the idea that as a member of society you deserve the rights of everyone else in that society, and put them together to achieve a better society as a whole then one can realize the potential of Social-Capitalism. Easier said than done, how do we even start to do this? Robert B. Reich suggests that through laws and regulations that “make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one,”6 laws that require companies to provide needed benefits, such as sick leave, health insurance, and paid time off, while still allowing the companies to prosper in our markets. By requiring social ethics to be mingled with business ethics we can provide a future for not only our companies but our employees as well.
The best example of this idea and a perfect illustration of how it could work is Hawaii’s health care plan. In 1974 Hawaii voted in a major bill that made a statewide government mandate to all employers operating within to provide health insurance to any employees working twenty or more hours a week.7 The mandate did not say every citizen got health care, it said every working person received it, thus eliminating the argument that bums and ne’er-do-wells who do not work will exploit the health care and undermine the benefits of it. Hawaii now boasts:
“Today Hawaii has the best access to health care in the nation, nearly 100 percent; Hawaii is the healthiest state in terms of longevity, infant mortality, premature morbidity, and morbidity rates for heart disease, cancer and emphysema. Also, Hawaii's health care costs are significantly lower than those of other states, a remarkable fact in view of Hawaii's generally high cost of living and the presence of social ills and at-risk populations.”8
While it may be a long road to get there is it not worth the work to know that a single mother won’t be without a home, that a displaced veteran won’t be forced to beg for change? Everyone working within a society deserves the protections and benefits of that society, and what kind of nation are we that we refuse to show mercy to those who deserve it?
