Chapter 6: The Biggest Product of Modern-Day Capitalism is Scarcity

The United States of America presents itself to the world and to its people as a bastion of freedom, liberty, human rights, and opportunity. We use the U.S. as an example since it is the most aggressive propagator of Capitalist paradigms in the world and has replicated its paradigm in many countries around the world. The Constitution has evolved to grant certain rights, starting with Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Yet interwoven with the Constitutionally-established governmental and legal structure is an socio-economic power structure that directly contradicts, nullifies and undermines the Constitution and the rights it guarantees. While cultural folklore holds up Soviet Communism as the archetypical antithesis of a free and democratic society, in fact under Capitalism one is not free to live outside of the Capitalist paradigm, even if one is not taking anything from anybody and harming no one.

In order to exercise one’s Constitutional rights, one must have a place to live, to occupy space. Yet since nearly every square inch of land in the United States that is not public land (owned by the government) is owned by an individual, business or other economic entity. Privately-owned land is off-limits to any but the owner, unless one pays money to the owner for temporary conditional permission to be there. Even if the owner is an ultra-wealthy neo-Feudal lord who will never use it or even worse, who will render it uninhabitable in the process of extracting resources from it for profit, it is illegal to live there. Public land is also off-limits. Even if you live in an RV that you own outright, most places have made it illegal to live in it unless you are paying rent in an RV park or to the owner of some other piece of land. The same goes for living on a boat, if one wishes to have access to land. Many cities have given police the power to confiscate the tents, sleeping bags and other meager possessions of homeless people in a culture where “possession is nine-tenths of the law.” In other words, in theory one has rights starting with Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, while in practice one only has what rights one can pay for, and one’s freedom, options, quality of life, and the degree of respect that one’s rights are given is directly proportional to one’s place in the economic pyramid. Apparently Constitutional rights only fully apply to the neo-Feudal lords and disembodied spirits who have no need to occupy space.

Cuba is held up as an example of a totalitarian dystopia. Yet Cubans pay no rent or mortgage – they are guaranteed the right to a place to live, as well as access to medical care, both of which are denied by default in the United States. That is not to say that Cuba is a paradise – it does suffer from its own anti-democratic problems. Yet it is one example of proof that the Capitalist paradigm enforced in the United States and many other countries is not the only viable model, common conceptions and propaganda notwithstanding.

A logical question is, how did land and other resources come into the hands that own it now? Briefly put, when the Europeans started occupying the Americas there were between 20 and 100 million people living there in many diverse nations and cultures. The Europeans unwittingly brought diseases with them to which the original Americans had no immunity, which resulted in a lot of deaths. This was unknowing and unintentional. What was intentional, however, was the systematic slaughter of those peoples while forcing them from the lands they lived on. Many of them had no concept of land ownership and would have coexisted with the Europeans with no problems. Massive herds of buffalo that could have fed Native Americans and Europeans were decimated to near extinction in order to starve the people. In the first recorded case of biological warfare, infected clothing and blankets were shipped to Natives as gifts. The Native nations were not treated with even the basic level of respect afforded between European countries at war. The intention and mentality were nearly identical to that of the Nazis in Germany when they set out to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other groups deemed inferior and an infestation of vermin. Do not think of them as “tribes,” since that perpetuates the stereotype of them as less than nations. They were nations with their own rich and complex cultures, religions, laws, alliances, and codes of conduct. The “Jewish Problem.” The “Indian Problem.” Same solution with slightly different methods. This was state-sanctioned at the highest levels and systematically, relentlessly carried out.

Then when the blood of the slaughtered peoples was not yet dry upon the land, the land was parceled out and given to homesteaders, prospectors, and even developers (such as the railroads). If you were there, you got a piece of land. If you weren’t, then your only option since then is to either rent from a landowner or buy land, which is kept so expensive that the overwhelming majority of people must take out a mortgage in order to buy a home, in which case for practical purposes they are renting from the lender until the mortgage is paid off. The home will be repossessed if the borrower becomes unable to keep up with mortgage payments. Yet with such a history and etiology, how can we respect such a construct as sacrosanct and immune to challenge. How can we continue to perpetuate it once we know both its derivation and its effects in the present?

Thus, Capitalism creates scarcity and barriers to access to land, something that was present before humans ever lived on it in sufficient abundance to accommodate all of the population. Yet over three-fourths of U.S. residents are paying every month to have a place to be. Over half a million Americans are homeless; yet there are over twelve million vacant living units. There is no actual shortage, only blocked access. The richest landowner in the United States owns more land than the area of the entire state of Delaware, while eighty percent of the people live on only three percent of the land. Ownership continues to concentrate unceasingly into fewer and fewer hands, leaving an ever-growing majority with nowhere that belongs to them. This pattern under modern Capitalism is functionally indistinguishable from the pattern under Medieval Feudalism. It is most certainly not a picture of a free, democratic society of unparalleled freedoms and human rights governed of, by and for the people.

Land is only one vital resource that is kept scarcified with currency barriers blocking the vast majority of people from access to ownership. It is given special focus because the right to occupy space is essential to all other rights and needs of life. It is also unique in that while a house does require building, the land itself was present and no human labor was involved in bringing it into being. Yet people were killed so that other people could control access and thus force billions of other people to pay them to be on the land, even though the controlling parties contributed nothing to the existence of the land.

The same pattern, however, is replicated with respect to every resource and necessity. Water is similarly controlled for the most part. It is there in lakes, glaciers and rivers whether or not humans are present. When someone takes control of a water source upstream, they can withhold it from those downstream unless they pay a price. Again, no value is created. Access is blocked. The resource is held hostage. It is more complicated of course since in modern times infrastructure must be built to distribute water to those who need it. The price charged, however, bears only glancing relationship to what is needed to cover the cost of the infrastructure. If the current trend continues, continued air pollution will lead to some corporation purifying air to make it breathable and charging people for the privilege of breathing it.

Capitalism is often called “free enterprise,” a term carrying an emotional implication of autonomy and freedom for the people to pursue their survival, yet its current form is anything but. Mammoth corporations with more resources than many countries dominate most goods and services, creating a business environment toxic to small business and individual initiative. Walmart or Target can move into a neighborhood and easily undercut competing small businesses out of existence and then raise prices as they wish. Former small business owners may end up as struggling employees of the large chains, working for sub-living wages. It is no more “free enterprise” than was the control and domination of the British Crown and corporations of pre-Revolutionary days in the U.S. When the mom and pop store went under, there was no help for them. If Walmart or Target were in danger of going under on the other hand, the government would take billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money to bail them out, as has happened under administrations of both main U.S. political parties.

Gigantic mega-corporations are able to largely control and dictate the course of scientific and technological research and development. One well-known example is the petroleum industry, who have systematically suppressed the development of already-existing and potential renewable energy technologies for over sixty years. They do this economically and in other ways. These corporations are able to assert their interests upon elected officials in such a way as to ensure that lawmakers, executive and judges will support their agenda and effectively suppress the development of alternative technologies, or at least ensure that they are kept on the fringes of energy usage. We see this very clearly in the current regime in power, who enthusiastically promote the interests of the petroleum industry over alternative technologies and even the long-term survival of multicellular life on earth. Though these multinational corporations may escape the legal definition of monopolies, they collaborate among them to function as a monopoly, setting pretty much any price they want. Pharmaceutical companies are another high-profile example, setting prices astronomically even on medications that they did not even develop. They do this because they know the demand is high and they control the supply, and because there are no consequences for doing so. Under Capitalist paradigms, this is not illegal. Such behavior is actively and strongly reinforced.

Truly, the principal product of Capitalism is scarcity and barriers to access to everything from a place to live to food to life-saving medicine.