Babies with bath-water:
Copyright has its VERY LIMITED place, patents too, though I’ve never understood allowing the patenting of an idea. If you have an idea for a weed-whacker, you should have to build the thing. But don’t lump Capitalism in with these. The way our socioeconomic system is working now isn’t capitalism, it’s a train wreck. The basics of capitalism keep companies honest and provide the best of everything to the consumer (that’s you).

Capitalism – Pure and Simple:
I own a small company, and, as does any business, I have competitors and customers. Each company has the option of offering either a better product/service than its competitor or a cheaper one. Sometimes it’s both, but rarely. Each customer then has the option of spending more for better or less for cheaper. At the end of the day, a healty, symbiotic relationship is born, choice is provided and the consumer decides who wins.

Investing used to simply mean that you’d lend money to a company that you thought had merit. The company could then use the extra capital to improve its product or service, gain market share and become more profitable. The reward to the investor was a share in the company?s profit. If a company didn’t perform well or was irresponsible, investors wouldn’t invest and through genuine Darwinian survival of the fittest, it would die off and be replaced by the more adaptive, responsible, smarter company. The good of this is easy to see.

What Went Wrong:
In the post-modern world, greed has gotten out of hand (by ?greed? I mean the blinding desire for personal gain at the subversion of all morality). What?s the reason? Simple; we, as a society, have abandoned the principles that made us great.

As a country America once held itself, as a whole (if not the individual), to a fairly clear moral code. The gradual departure from a creator-derived morality to the idea of a self-imposed culturally-relative morality has led us to where we teach and live by the latter yet expect treatment by the former.

If the finance major takes a philosophy class and learns that right and wrong have their origin in society and are therefore self-derived and inherently alterable, how dare you hold him to any morality but his own. If, however, morality has its origins in a creator, we’re all bound to it and consequences can then be levied.

Capitalism and the American way of life (I say ?American? with a solemn reference to the founding of this nation) could not have developed with a worldview other than the Judea-Christian beliefs in which it was framed. No other religion, no other belief, puts the emphasis on the individual’s rights and freedoms. A pantheistic world view could not and has not spawned a society (even with its flaws and closet full of skeletons) as free and respectful of human rights as America.

God save the…
We need, quite simply, to get back to our roots as a nation that believes that morality is NOT something mankind created. The accountability that comes with a creator-derived morality is the only way a society as free as ours can survive. This cannot be done from Washington; morality cannot be legislated. It must be taught. It must be taught at home, in school, at the workplace. When this happens the result is a society where welfare isn?t necessary because divine-inspiration, not legislation, compels the wealthy to generosity and the capable to productivity.

-josh