Business Casualty

Business. Busy-ness. The state of being busy, like happiness or blandness or strangeness. It's one of those words that is part of nearly every human being's vocabulary in whatever language one speaks. In the world I live almost anything can be a business. Almost everything is. At what point, though, do the highly esteemed precepts of business in our society go from being socially constructive to socially destructive?

I think American society and several others have already passed that point. Business as usual is, and has been, a destructive force to the society and environment in which we live. As a student at the free market capitalism-loving, Milton Friedman-worshiping, Communism-fearing department of Economics at UCLA, I was consistently fed the traditional 'maximize production-minimize costs-government stay the fuck out the way' formula. To be honest, in theory all of it sounds really good.

Then I took an Environmental Economics course and realized that business as usual (economics at UCLA) is in large part the reason why human-inhabited areas of the planet are a complete dump. Though Milton Friedman's main assertion was that free market policies were the best way to set free, politically and socially, a state under totalitarian or central control, I find it hard to believe that the United States is a politically and socially 'free' country. What Milton Friedman didn't bank on was the insatiable greed of humans. That thought is curious, because one of the first thing you learn in economics is the very concept of human greed. Essentially, economics is the study of how to curb human greed from threatening our survival. Hence the morbid fear of monopolies, oligopolies, and the Prisoners' Dilemma.

Though I clearly haven't refined my thoughts in this post yet, my point is that capitalism as it stands is a dangerous force. It has given dominance to those countries that have adopted its ways, but a truly inequitable world has been created as a result. And the scary part is that the countries which are sowing the seed of their economic future today (China, Korea, India, Brazil, South Africa...) are pursuing the same ends that the early-industrial countries did. Eventually these countries will reach a peak like the US and some European countries and then what? For all the dislike of America around the world, there are few countries (are there any?) that have the fortitude to break away from following its lead into an unsustainable future.

...keep it fresh

- neil