Humans need oxygen to survive, but breathing pure oxygen for a long period of time will cause your lungs to fill with fluid and you will die. The condition is called atelectasis. When oxygen is available in the air, balanced with nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and other gasses, it sustains life.
Likewise, sodium, in its pure form, is toxic to humans. Chlorine is also toxic in its pure gaseous state. However, when these two come together as Sodium Chloride (NaCl), common table salt, can now flavor and preserve meat and can play a crucial role in maintaining human health. Salt is the main source of sodium and chloride ions in the human diet. Sodium is essential for nerve and muscle function and is involved in the regulation of fluids in the body.
As in the examples above, capitalism in its purest form cannot function and socialism is just plain horrible. Neither can properly function without some balance. Capitalism, where all trade and industry are wholly managed by private owners for profit sounds like it should work until you try to figure out who will pay for the roads to get merchandise to market. How does anyone earn a profit if there are no agreed-upon means of exchange beyond simple barter? What happens when a corporate giant becomes powerful enough to stifle all competition and possibly causes harm to various sectors of our population and environment? Some regulation is required. With regulation comes some government or social influence and control.
Socialism is regularly defined as an interim step to communism where the state controls all industry. This too is inherently bad and is at cross-purposes with our established democratic beliefs. American politicians who are regularly labeled as socialists do not really promote or defend the Marxist ideals of a pure socialist society but are committed to providing a balance between capitalism and the social needs of our society. They will generally promote the rights of workers over the pure profit motives of an unchecked industrialized nation. The problem here is that not many people can differentiate among the various flavors of socialism and so all forms are labeled as something evil. What both capitalism and socialism (democratic socialism?) need is balance and they both need to be better defined.
Politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been labeled socialists for want of a better term. Their farther-left-than-most views are probably doomed to failure. I say this, not because I find their ideals abhorrent, but because much of what they stand for cannot come to fruition in our current political environment. Their views are beyond the simple comprehension of many Americans and would never stand a chance in our bi-partisan arena.
We need a new term for an ideology that supports capitalism but also meets the social ideals espoused by many on the left. Whatever label we come up with can’t have “social” in the title. This new ideal needs to strike a balance between unbridled capitalism and the needs of the working class. Gordon Gekko of 1987 Wall Street movie fame, who eschewed “Greed is Good,” cannot be the guiding principle of American society and no form of Marxist socialism can be tolerated.
It is somewhere in this middle ground that we should set our goal. What we need is an enforceable balance to capitalism that manages the inherent greed of mankind and simultaneously fulfills the needs of the many. We can’t allow the Golden Rule to be twisted to “He who has the most gold, rules.” Somewhere between Sanders, Warren's ideas, and a process that allows capitalism to thrive in a fair and just manner lies what should be our ideological destination.
Even Bernie Sanders’ approach as a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” has two major flaws. The first and most glaring flaw is the word socialist in the title. It’s a non-starter for most. The second flaw is the word democratic as it places the stigma of party affiliation on an ideal that should appeal to all. As I write this, I too am struggling to come up with a better term and I am open to suggestions. Perhaps “Responsible Capitalism” would work.
For brevity, I will refer to Responsible Capitalism as this new ideal. In it, one primary objective would be to completely restructure and simplify the tax code. No matter what anyone believes, taxes are unavoidable and our society cannot function without some form of revenue to otherwise support the needs of our society. The fact that we currently allow the very wealthy to have so much of a say in the creation of our tax laws, means that we should not be amazed that the rich are the beneficiaries of those laws. Taxes should be a fair means to an end. That end would be to raise enough revenue to run our country without an ever-expanding deficit. If we had a tax system that fairly taxed us, we should be able to solve the rest of this nation’s problems. I won’t go into detail here about what a “fair” tax system should look like, but suffice it to say the system currently in place is not fair. Not one person can argue that when $billion corporations pay NO TAXES, that this is a fair system.
Any Democrat who proposes reforms who doesn’t want to be labeled a “socialist” had better show how they plan to support our capitalistic system within their goals of social reform. They need to abolish the term “social” in anything they discuss and remove that word from any talking points. You can use such terminology AFTER you are elected. Call your ideas Responsible Capitalism or whatever term best describes your ideology, just avoid the “S-word.” Use it at your political peril. One more point before we leave the topic of do’s and don’ts, cover the economy, job creation, infrastructure, and tell us all how you plan to pay for things.
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| Start here, Lao Tzu |
These are complex issues and no simple solution will be the masterstroke that creates our new utopia. But, as they have said for millennia, “千里之行始於足下” Or, for you who are a bit rusty with your Chinese proverbs written in hanzi, “A journey of a thousand Chinese miles starts beneath one’s feet.” Since Chinese miles are about 1/3 the length of ours (their feet are smaller), that journey is, in reality, around 300 US miles. That’s about the distance between Miami and Gainesville for you Floridians. You see, Responsible Capitalism is already closer than you thought.
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| Small Chinese Feet |
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