CAPITALISM IS DEAD, LONG LIVE GREED

If you know of Stalin, Hitler, Mugabe and Murdoch get ready for the unparalleled evils of Woolworths, Coles, Apple and Google.

Far for it for a socialist to preach on behalf of capitalism but I have, and still maintain, a certain respect for the free enterprise system of times past. To me true capitalism is the right for every individual to make his or her way in the world as they see fit, to produce things, to sell things, to make profits and to employ others to do the work for them. I think I have said before that capitalism is really a system of ‘perpetual motion’ each action in turn producing another action which, in the fullness of time, brings us back to the start and the process begins again.

Each complete cycle hopefully adds just a small amount to the domestic product of the nation which should be enough to allow the population to grow and be gainfully employed, for wages and conditions to slowly improve and bring an entire nation into a state of comfort, and lay the groundwork for our future generations. Control of wages and subsequent prices while still remaining free and competitive is important to avoid unreasonable inflation which eats away at wages and conditions and begins to create poverty rather than prevent it.

I would have thought it fair that an owner should be compensated ten times more than his lowest paid worker. If a standard wage for the worker was $800.00 a month then it is reasonable that an owner be allowed to earn $8,000 in the same period. After all the owner is the one who puts up the money and takes the risk so they should be compensated accordingly.

In recent decades however we have seen owners (or at least the Executives on behalf of the owners) earn in excess of 200 times more. If the average wage was still $800 a month an Executive can now rip off

$ 160,000 before it reaches the bottom line and subsequently what the owners or shareholders will receive. This has meant owners still receive about the same as they did before except a fortune has been redirected, almost fraudulently, before the benefits flow on to the workers or even the purchasers of the product.

What we see in this new century is no longer benefiting from the sweat of your brow or the result of your intelligence but the acquisition of wealth through acquisition. Take the supermarkets. They have not benefited from good business or even fair trading. They have not sought to be faster, provide a better product, a better service or to fairly compete on the open market. They have borrowed from the Financiers and bought out their competitors or subsidized prices below cost to their competitors, they have acquired wealth by bribery and stealth and not through good business acumen.

A former Woolworths Executive decried the fact that the producer of a product no longer decided on the price it would sell for to make a fair profit, but that the supermarkets now dictate to the producer, even to the point of driving them out of business, the price which the supermarket will pay regardless of the value it will eventually sell for. This tactic of course drives out competitors who try to buy and sell in a fair trading environment.

Cashed up supermarkets then buy up huge swathes of other businesses as well, adding to their outlets for distribution and putting further unfair pressure on the rest of the engine of the economy, smaller businesses. hotels, service stations, distribution systems, credit cards, telephone companies and advertising agencies, hardware stores, liquor sales, chemists, newspaper outlets and dozens of other ‘hidden’ acquisitions which will force out their competitors. The Australian supermarket system, as with its media ownership, is the most noncompetitive in the world, little wonder shoppers now look overseas for their purchases and deny our local economy the opportunity to engage in true capitalism.