tiny rant on capitalism

tl;dr: capitalism is not inherently flawed, and pursuing profits is not inherently evil. it is a game, and when evil is legal in the game, you cannot blame winners for playing optimally.

I thought of this while sitting in a lecture about faith and capitalism. The message being communicated by the professor was quite honestly not bad on its own—the same old “we have to think about God and morality when making business decisions”. Obviously not a bad philosophy for running companies, and I can certainly think of a few that ought to do that more.

When I thought about it a little deeper, though, I realized that it is quite literally impossible to do that in real life, outside of an ethics professors’ utopia where everyone acts in everyone else’s best interest. This is not a dig at ethics professors, by the way—every field has its own utopia upon which it bases its teachings upon. Economics assumes everyone thinks rationally when making economic decisions, and programmers assume people actually care about performance.

Kidding aside, the notion that entities in a capitalist system must follow some basic moral philosophy to not delve into anarchy and chaos is not something new nor novel. Obviously, Apple would obviously love to kill every competitor it had, but it can’t.

It becomes a little harder to distinguish between what is moral and what isn’t when we talk about actions that don’t drive deep into our primitive natures. Killing is something that no one would like to see, nor do (and if you do, there’s a medical term for you). Making specialized hardware that can’t be fixed by an independent technician is something that we unfortunately didn’t have to evolve an aversion to, and so lives in a much grayer area ethically speaking.

Usually, when companies commit egregious sins against humanity, it is (and always is) in pursuit of profits. This is the main driver of capitalism—fierce competition starves the weak and unoptimal and rewards the strong and efficient. Obviously, this formula works. Advancements in technology, logistics, and manufacturing that make the world as abundant as it is today is a direct result of capitalism’s competition.

In pursuit of abundance, players in the capitalist game throw away morality in favor of efficiency. Nestlé is allegedly privatizing water, shrinkflation has led to consumers paying more for the same product, and “modern day slavery” is happening in regions of South Africa rich with rare earth metals used in the manufacturing of batteries.

So is capitalism inherently flawed? A lot of people seem to think so, but I think (and I think this is the view most people arrive at) that with an adequate system of checks and balances, as well as good policy enforcement, a lot of these problems can be avoided.

For those of you rolling your eyes, yes—having a good controlling body that regulates a capitalist system is an entire problem on its own. However, I think a lot of the discord around this topic comes from a disproportionate amount of attention being paid towards the evil actions of companies that are simply acting in their own best interests according to the rules of the game.