CAPITALISM IS CRAZY
‘Ruh oh, here we go’, you’re thinking. ‘She’s had a couple of beers and got political again. She’s ranting and raving and won’t listen to sense. Quick, let me navigate away from this page before the barrage of slurred conspiracy theories starts dissolving my hard-earned brain cells.
Ah ha! Well, think again my friend, for I can (reasonably) confidently confirm that I have only had ONE beer today, and this blog post is totally sane. Capitalism, on the other hand, is absolutely CRAZY. And I don’t mean this in an affectionate, ‘wouldn’t have you any other way’ kind of tone. Please don’t read this the way JD and Turk cheerily say ‘Hooch is crazy’ in Scrubs. I mean it. Forget about inhumane, this concept we’ve built our democracy around has become SUPER RIDICULOUS.
Let me explain what led me to this conclusion, and to add my two cents to a conversation which a lot of people would consider closed by David Hassellhoff on top of a wall in 1989.
I’m not an economist, but based on my limited understanding, I get the point of capitalism. I get that it’s important to affix value to products and services, to allow us to trade effectively in them. That’s a sound idea, really it is. But as society evolves and changes, so necessarily will its foundations, and capitalism has evolved into a CRAZY BITCH.
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| Any western export delivered by the Hoff is always 100% welcome, right? |
Allow me to demonstrate with a very tangential story. I came across a report recently about the myriad benefits public parks provide to society. Great, right? It included a section about a government committee designed to make it much easier to convey the value of public parks, and drive more councils and businesses to invest their time and money in them. This committee was called the Natural Capital Committee, and I still can't understand how anyone writing about this committee manages to do so with a straight face, so ridiculous and comical is the purpose of this ACTUAL GOVERNMENT FUNDED INITIATIVE.
Since 2012, the Natural Capital Committee has been dedicated to showing the ‘true economic value of habitats and species by placing financial metrics on the 'free' goods and services provided by nature.’ This means there are people who are paid by government to translate things like the beauty of trees, the exhilaration of a good morning run, the pleasant chirping of birds and the rush of jumping off a swing into hard cash value. I mean, really. Apart from being far from a science, it’s also JUST SUPER DUMB. The report states, with the unbridled positivity of the guy who voices the JML infomercials, that metrics now exist “that allow the accurate calculation of the economic value of … storing carbon, [and] providing food and clean water”.
That’s a scary sentence, and not just because it uses the hellish mathematical buzzwords of ‘calculation’ and ‘economic’ in the same breath. That sentence tells me that I live in a world where it’s seen as necessary to affix monetary value to that nifty thing trees do where they create oxygen for life. A handful of intelligent individuals are required - sorry, PAID - to demonstrate the financial value of THE ABILITY TO FREAKING BREATHE. As if the value of LITERALLY STAYING ALIVE wasn’t self evident. It’s hysterical, ridiculous, and also more than mildly dystopian. The most dystopian thing about it is that the many many people whose hands this report has gone through, and who established this committee, can’t have seen it this way. This madness was to them, logical and sensible, and a good use of time and money.
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| Did they factor in the cost to the NHS when she breaks her ankle joyously jumping off that swing to their calculations? Is the creative thought and confidence she builds from playing outdoors worth more or less than the cost of a 6 week cast? Most importantly, WHO THE HELL SERIOUSLY WORKS THIS SHIT OUT? |
The version of capitalism we have found ourselves in has morphed so much that the language of money is the only language governments, companies and the other bodies that run our society trade in. In order to persuade those in power of the value of anything, we have to do so in terms of hard cash. Whole government discourses run on this premise, without anyone questioning the super-flawed fundamentals on which the debate is set. It’s pre-agreed that the way to win a policy argument is through finance. ‘How much money can be saved by increasing access to mental health?’, politicians ask. Not ‘How many people will be healthier and safer?’, which is surely the primary aim of any mental health policy. The freedom and safety of financial markets has become, weirdly, far more sacrosanct than the freedom and safety of human beings.
Nothing, including the very air we breathe, it seems, is good or valuable unless it can be monetized. This principle, shown in this report at its most ridiculous of logical extensions, is the same principle that sees the disabled, the unemployed, refugees, low-earners and students so badly treated by western democracies. Our current version of capitalism isn't an all-access market, promoting healthy competition. It's an absolutely ludicrous joke.
Money and capitalism were meant to aid the smooth running of society, but now society seems to be increasingly arranged to aid the smooth flow of money. I’m not crazy - THAT IS.
