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Expanding on that slightly- yes, it's possible to buy local and organic, for example, to donate to good causes, to build a zero-emissions home, to walk to work - but all of these things are expensive, and require significant resources. One of the things that irritates me about exponents of the free choice model is that they tend to ignore that if one is living with few resources one has little real choice - one may be able to select from a dozen different _brands_ of cheap, heavily processed food, but what choice, exactly, does that represent?
Also, all of these things are being done in an environment where the way to acquire the resources to do all of these ethical-living free-choice activities involves plugging into a system which, as you have acknowledged, has essentially no concern for ethical process at all; it will seek to do everything it can to avoid or minimise the impact of law on its ability to maximise profit - including, which is another thing which has been mentioned and which you have not included in your model, using its considerable political power. Waaaaay back on page one, I said:
Your model seems to be a bit like a traditional marriage, where business brings a load of money home, gives some of it to his wife, society, as housekeeping and goes back to wealth generation, leaving her to allocate her stipend to good works, cleaning and culturally improving activities. However, that neglects to take into account that business, in order to maximise profit, has both the ability and the compulsion to exert pressure on society and government. This is quite apparent in the US, where often large companies which provide many constituents with jobs can induce congressmen and senators to serve their mutual interest by securing federal funding - handouts, in effect, from the housekeeping kitty - for their own ends.
This ties in to a couple of other issues, for example the power business has in poor countries, and its relatively limited accountability - Shell in Nigeria was the cited example, Union Carbide in Bhopal is another quite famous one. Also, of course, that by participating in this system in order to get the cash for one's organic veg or one's sustainable farm in the Cotswolds, one is participating in the continuing degradation of the world's ability to sustain its population. Also from back on page one:
But that doesn't end all global poverty, does it? As a case in point: by creating a set of consumers in India and China who want, for example, to consume beef sandwiches, wealth generation leads to massive pressure being put on farming resources. Beef is a process product - it can be sold for more than the potential value of the resources put into raising the cow that generates it. However, a cow also produces less actual usable food than the same amount of grain. This is not the concern of the companies producing, buying or processing and exporting beef, and the governments in the countries where the beef is being grown can be induced to cooperate with the companies through differences in the exchange value of their currency and reserves and the cash realisable by the companies. However, this leads to shortages in food, damage to the soil, disruption of the farming culture and so on in that country. What's the solution to that? Logically, generate wealth so that everyone in that country can be rich, and then buy their own beef sandwiches. But from where do they do that? Where is the wealth built, and where is it allocated? As ES says, some very rich people in, say, Nigeria may increase the average wealth of a statistical Nigerian, but it need not do much for an actual Nigerian, especially if the government that should be representing him or her is compelled by their own circumstances to conspire with rather than to put a brake on the practices of their corporate patrons.
So, there's a problem there. More broadly, although sticking with the US, UK and Western European countries is a pretty good idea, tactically, because they have generally high standards of living (although in particular the US has considerable urban and rural poverty also, of course, of a kind which I believe you think no longer really exists in realised capitalist economies - I don't think poverty in Western Europe really exists anymore). However, they are manifestly not the only capitalist economies, not least because, due to the importance of open markets to exploit, capitalist economies aggressively seek the breakdown of any system that seeks to close markets to them. So, Chad, Malawi (where the aggressive advancement of free market strategies as a condition of IMF assistance led to repeated famines until the government forcibly subsidised fertiliser) and Burkina Faso, for example, are all operating in open markets, or more precisely in markets which are canted in the favour of the interests of the largest operators. Also, of course, China was pushed hard as an example of the success of capitalism:
I think it is clear and obvious that capitalism in China and India has generated wealth and improved the lives of billions.
However, China does not have a free press, and its businesses are broadly state-owned. It happens to be a big enough economy to set terms to keep wealth in its borders, in a way that many countries are not, for example by making it far easier to function as a part-Chinese joint venture operating through a shell company than as a wholly foreign-owned business. If you are a small coffee grower in Africa, you do not tend to get the same protections from your government, not least because your government cannot fight your corner with the same resources behind you - which, incidentally, is one reason why I think the question of whether coffee shops should be privately or publicly run is a limitingly insular inquiry; it focuses only on one tiny point at the end of what is currently a long chain of potentially exploitative practice. China's approach - it's heavily controlled interaction with open markets - is sensible given that the institution of capitalist economics led to the collapse of the Russian economy in the 90s (and the Japanese economy, incidentally, and the Albanian economy, and the Argentinian economy, in different ways). However, it's not capitalism in the UK/EU/US sense at all, and in fact those systems are different enough to raise questions about whether it even makes a lot of sense to say "the countries where people enjoy high standards of living, which happen also to be highly-developed, early-industrialised, to have either huge mineral wealth or to have had access to the mineral wealths of other countries through Empire - that's capitalism, and nothing else counts". |
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