written 26 Dec 2021
published 2 Jan 2022
Capitalism is a way of organizing economic profits for the benefit of a few. At a small business scale, this allows versatility and ingenuity to explore different paths, with results that can be beneficial to the overall society. But there are many necessary parts of society that don't clearly generate profits: emergency responses and collective material and financial infrastructures. When these systems are underfunded or absent, the society suffers, risking complete failure.
The benefits of wide spread socialist structures are so ubiquitous that we take them for granted. In Ukiah, where I live, the electric power system, city roads, local police and courts, fire services, water and sewage systems are all owned by the City. The County of Mendocino owns most of the smaller roads, the Sheriff's department and county courts. The state of California owns wild fire control organizations, most of the larger roads, and the state legal system. The federal government owns the freeways, the national postal system, and the national legal system. I collect Social Security, and qualify for Medi-Care, important socialized systems. All of these systems have issues, without a doubt, but imagine a world where none of them existed, and corporations were expected to fill the needs.
How would a totally privatized road system work? Could you even leave your property if you had no cash on hand? How would goods deliveries be handled? How would emergency repairs be funded? Imagine what an adverse impact there would be on the general flow of the economy. There are real economic benefits to collective systems.
We in Ukiah pay about 2/3 the price for electricity that PG&E customers in the rest of the county pay, which is typical for publicly owned power systems. The reason is a difference in organizational intent. PG&E wants to maximize executive salaries and shareholder returns, while Ukiah wants to provide a reliable power system while minimizing customer costs. Same power, but very different pricing structures.
The United States is dominated by capitalist economics, resulting is massive economic inequity, and degradation of our quality of life, compared to other developed countries that aren't as frightened by socialism. For example, our health care system is primarily privately owned, resulting in a health care infrastructure that is kept at a minimal level, with a smaller bed per capita, to not "waste" investment. This may make short term fiscal sense, but the recent pandemic shows the high cost of lack of resilience, as our facilities are being saturated by each wave of Covid, and the medical staff is reaching burnout.
When these capitalist systems fail, it is the socialism of the federal government that comes to the rescue to serve the real needs of our society. Public health is a collective recognition that we are all better off if we care for our citizens who are ill, including people who have limited resources. This socialist investment profits from the costs avoided by not allowing disease to flourish and spread.
The recent increase in destructive wildfires has disrupted the economics of the fire insurance industry in California, causing many companies to no longer renew policies, because they plan to leave the state, another example of the limits of capitalism. But the banking and real estate industries will collapse without insurance coverage, threatening the entire state economy. One solution is the socialist expansion of the State fire insurance program, much like the federal flood insurance program, which resulted from private insurance bailing on areas of increased flooding.
Countries with a longer history than the US have all included socialist structures into their society. They have learned that the world is connected, and evolved their economy to align with that fact, rather than pretending that life is nothing more than lethal competition.
We are facing serious challenges to the simplistic assumptions underlying capitalism, which ignores and degrades the commons, and requires continued expansion of extracted resources and energy, on an over populated, finite planet. Like it or not, we really are all in this together. We must evolve or die.
