Terminal Velocity

Just because the law of gravity dictates that in free fall we will achieve terminal velocity and go splat, does not mean that we must obey that law by hurling ourselves from high places.

I don’t have a very high opinion of economists in general but Paul Krugman remains in my opinion, among the best in breed. Unlike most economists, who aim to legitimize a theory of unfettered markets as natural laws that must be obeyed, Krugman understands that Capitalism, as a method for distributing the wealth of a society among its members. is an approach of our own choosing. He is among that rare breed of economists —those with a conscience—who rejects the amorality of free-market “natural law” theory.

In his book of essays, The Accidental Theorist, published around 2000, he wrote:

At the heart of capitalism’s inhumanity–and no sensible person will deny that the market is an amoral and often cruelly capricious master–is the fact that it treats labor as a commodity. Economics textbooks may treat the exchange of labor for money as a transaction much like the sale of a bushel of apples, but we all know that in human terms there is a huge difference…. An unsold commodity is a nuisance, an unemployed worker a tragedy; it is terribly unjust that such tragedies are created every day by new technologies, changing tastes, and the ever-shifting flows of world trade.

Krugman concluded his remark with the following reference:

There would be no excuse for an economic system [Capitalism] that treats people like objects except that, as Churchill said of democracy, capitalism is the worst system known except all those others that have been tried from time to time…

But even if we agree that Capitalism has proven itself better than the others to which we have compared it,  we have most certainly not compared it to ALL possible methods.