The other day I heard an interview with a more or less progressive Businessman who seemed like a reasonable guy and much of what he said made a lot of sense to me. But one thing he said struck me because it sort of reveals the core misunderstanding about capitalism that allows people to continue to believe that capitalism is inherently morally good.

He was referring to the recent initiative by President Obama to work toward building more jobs. The President has recently held a Job Summit in the White House, has been floating the idea of redirecting saved TARP money toward small business job initiatives, and gave a speech today on the job initiatives the white house plans to engage in.

What the Businessman said was that the people at the conference were misunderstanding the nature of the jobs problem. He said people were talking about jobs as if they are made out of thin air. But his argument was that jobs don’t come out of thin air. Somebody, some entrepreneur, creates a business to fill a need. That’s how jobs are made. That’s how capitalism works. It fills needs and in so doing creates are amazingly wonderful advanced world. That was his argument

Do you see the basic problem with this? It should be staring us in the face as blindingly as the Sun. Capitalsim fills needs. Hmm, does capitalism fill needs? hmmm…

Do you need to drink coke? Do you really need it? How about candy? Fast food? Those are really necessary right?

Do you need pornography? Do you really need reality television shows? What about big budget movies or movie theater popcorn? Would the world end if there was never another football game? How about if you never saw another advertisement again? Would that be the end of times?

Do people need subprime loans? Or a big gas guzzling SUV? Do people need ten times the credit lines that they are likely to ever be able to repay in their lifetimes? Do you think people really need that stuff???

Capitalism doesn’t fill needs. It doesn’t enable us to fill all these great wonderful needs we’ve developed over time. That’s just a total misunderstanding of human nature as well as the nature of capitalism. Filling needs isn’t capitalism’s core function at all.

It’s WANTS.

That’s what an entrepreneur does. He finds something that people want and that they want enough that they’re willing to pay for and then he sells it to them. It doesn’t matter if they need it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the exact opposite of what they need. It doesn’t even matter if it’s inherently damaging in the long run to BOTH customer and provider. If a person wants it, somebody will sell it to them. And if enough people want something, somebody can and will try to get rich off of the selling That’s all there is too it.

Think about an addiction. With enough people addicted to cigarettes, businesses can make billions of dollars selling cigarettes. And they do.  But those people who are addicted are not having their needs fulfilled. Quite the opposite, what they need is to quit smoking. That leads them to the longest term happiness. But they can’t help but smoke because they are addicted. And they started smoking in the first place because of wants. The want to look cool or the want to relieve stress or the want to not stand out or the want to get high. Not needs. Wants. And industry was right there to fill those wants and worse tell people that it was perfectly safe and no harm would come to them for doing it.

So much of our commercial industry exists to try and trick us into thinking our wants are our needs. And we are extremely susceptible to it. It certainly makes us feel better to think that we need that plastic surgery or that expensive car to get the highest paying job we can or to find a mate. It’s nice to think that we need fancy vitamin waters to compete in sports and that we need to eat those delicious foods or go on those fancy vacations or to play those expensive video games to feel like we’re living a good and happy life. But those aren’t needs. They’re wants.

Fundamentalist capitalism as a philosophy promotes the idea that through free industry we can organically match together all our needs with the people who can fill them. In the theory we’re all perfectly rational, albeit selfish actors. So what we demand most is what we need most and what we are willing to offer are going to be things that people need. The world thus gets better with every new business. A new need is filled that would not have been otherwise. It sounds GREAT in theory.

But that’s not how the actual world works. We are not that perfectly rational. And most of us are rational enough to KNOW that. In so far as we get our needs fulfilled by capitalism it is almost incidental. But we do get plenty of our wants fulfilled all the time. The richer we are the more wants we get. It just so happens that sometimes we’re lucky enough to want a few things we actually need so those wants get fulfilled too. But at the same time there’s all kinds of wants being fulfilled that we do not need with higher precedent than our needs. There are even some wants that we are getting filled that cause far more harm to us than good.

Capitalism is not morally good. Nor is it morally bad. It’s a system. It’s not a magic system or a miracle system. It’s just a system. And that’s all it is.  It does some good things and does some other bad things, but to understand what those things are we have to take a calm reasonable sober look at what the system really is. Closing our eyes and pretending that capitalism fills all our needs like magic provided we just have enough faith in it is absolute rubbish and needs to be expunged from our consciousness.

When fighting for rights the easiest is to fight for the rights of the powerful. In today’s society the powerful generally means the rich, well educated, and well connected. Their rights are easy to defend for they simply take them and hold them via force unless someone makes them let them go.

Second to that is the challenge of fighting for the rights of the majority. That’s more difficult but still not too hard because there’s lots of people there who can fight, and all they have to do is force the powerful and the minorities to concede them their rights. The minorities are unlikely to challenge them except when those minorities are themselves powerful. Democracy is the full representation of Just rights granted to the Majority. Yet in our Democracy there are still areas where the majority are heavily denied those rights. Hence we still have a concept of a Senate that privileges moneyed interests in small populations over the rights of the majority.  And hence too we find it so difficult to get policies implemented even when they are supported by the majority. Examples include majority support for Health Care Reform (in general, not the specific proposals being debated today) and majority support for withdrawal from wars abroad.

Harder even than securing the rights of the majority, is securing the rights of the minority. Particularly the weak minority groups. The smaller the groups the harder it is to secure their rights. They lack the power to force others to acknowledge their rights and in the past have had to hope that they be given to them as handouts.  Indeed throughout most of human history the idea of actually garnering protections to the rights of the powerless minority seemed an impossibility. Little did the powerful even deign to acknowledge their existence. Only in the modern era has it proven possible to change that paradigm with the advent of Civil Rights Movement, and the Solidarity Movement, and the discovered power of Non-violent Protest. The key to fighting for the rights of the minority is combining minority groups together and drawing upon the support of the majority. There is a natural human inclination to root for the underdog and to feel compassion for others in need. By latching on to those emotions, the minority can and does sometimes find itself capable of wrestling its so called “inalienable” rights from the majority and the powerful. But it’s an endless struggle for all the incentives are always pushing the majority and the powerful to take what they want for themselves and give little back

But hardest of all, is securing the Rights of Future Generations. They are in effect the smallest possible minority. They have no representation. Nobody to speak for them. They cannot object to the suffering the present imposes upon them and we in the present cannot look upon them and see the harm we have caused and feel an urge to change it out of guilt or pity.

Yet they too have rights. And just as much rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any of us living today. They have the right to as much of a chance at achieving that as we have.  And it is our responsibility as a people to give them those rights.

The fight to Protect the Earth’s Environment is about protecting THOSE rights.

When we eat up all of various species of fish in the Ocean, we deny future generations the right not just to eat fish, but even to experience fish. They will live in a world where those species don’t exist. They won’t see them swimming in schools down the river. They’ll never see any of the jump in the air. They’ll never sit by a lake and fish them out of the Ocean. They’ll never hold them in their hands. Whenever a species goes extinct for our actions we deny generations of humanity the ability to ever know those species and all the wisdom and understanding that knowledge could have brought them. We give them only our history books and leave them a less rich world.

When our policies destroy natural resources those are resources our children’s children’s children will not have.  When cataclysmic climate change sinks lands under rising oceans that’s land that future generations will not be able to populate and explore. When cataclysmic climate change radically shifts our Planet’s climate causing a mass extinction, that will deny countless countless children the right to even exist.

The scope of these problems cannot possibly be understated. Today. Right now. We have 25 million people who are environmental refugees because of our changing climate. Conservative estimates suggest that will increase to 150 million over the next fifty years. 10 million people in Africa have been forced to migrate because of increase desertification of their lands. 500,000 people in Bhola Island in Bangladesh were made permanently homeless because their island was left permanently underwater thanks to rising sea levels. These are not the last cases. They are the tip of the iceberg.

Scientists are inherently conservative. This is one thing that is often missed in the debates regarding Climate Change. The bulk of the estimates Climate Scientists have made have been underestimates. Everything is transpiring much more rapidly than Scientists predicted and the possibilities of rapid cataclysmic climate change are many. One of the most terrifying scenarios comes from the melting of the arctic ice.

That was posted in this article. Read it. Read every word. And tell me the prospects are not horrifying?

And that’s just from the ice melting. Predictions about what happens when we over acidify the oceans are no less terrifying. Nor are the effects of just our continual climate annihilation by over hunting and over fishing of the species of our planet destroying ecosystems that have existed for thousands of years. As early as 1993 Scientists have estimated that the the Earth has been losing during the expansion of human population on the order of 30,000 species PER YEAR! Or about 3 per hour! And estimates back then have been shown to underestimate the loss. It’s only increasing in speed. http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html

The Baijal dophin, the west african black rhino, and the golden toad are all animal species that have gone extinct over just the last few years. That list would include many species of tigers, whales, eagles, and sharks that you’d grown up hearing about were it not for the concerted efforts of environmentalists around the world to save them from the brink of extinction.

Never mistake this for just “business as usual”. None of these changes would have happened now in this way or this rapidly were it not for our direct impact. There has never been a species like us on this Planet and the changes we are making to the environment are completely unprecedented. If everyone lived as we in the United States live, we would require five more planet Earths to produce the amount of resources we consume. Think of your own lifestyle. Can you imagine cutting your resource consumption by to one sixth of what it is now? That’s what’s needed with current population. And population is continuing to grow at a steady pace. Even if none of the dire predictions with regards to Global Warming or Environmentalists prove true, our current course is still leading us to a future of disastrous consequences. As we run out of oil and water to drink and to cultivate food and food to feed everyone there will be chaos. Millions will die in misery without ever having had a chance to truly live.

And it will be all entirely our fault.

And it’s not like we don’t know. Perhaps our grandparents could claim ignorance. We cannot. The knowledge is there. Unequivocal evidence is everywhere. And Scientists around the world have independently sounded the same warnings again and again and again. If we don’t listen, and if we don’t change it’s not because we didn’t know and it’s not because we couldn’t. It’s because we didn’t want to.

Any why not? Think about it. It’s all about the incentives. You, right here, right now have no incentives whatsoever to do anything about it. We can live on in our wealth, gluttons on natural resources and we face few to none of the consequences. The chances of disaster stirking in such a way that it drastically impacts our way of life is SLIM. We’re in the prime of our lives NOW. We can live it up and nothing is stopping us. Consequences? Bah! Those are for people we never met, will never meet, and have zero incentive to care about. If the whole world ends the day after you die, you could care less. You’re already dead!

Those who have children and grandchildren will, at least, have some connection to those future generations. But even then it’s only two or three generations removed. If you engage in activities that will doom the population of ten generations removed you have little reason to care. You and everyone you’ve ever known will be long dead and hardly even a memory.

That’s why, Environmental issues are the very hardest issue to manage to make real progress achieving change in. We’ve barely been able to make progress in fighting for the rights of the majority and the rights of the minorities. And we can see them. They’re US. Our friends, our family, ourselves. Yet it’s so hard to make any progress. We go in fits and starts inching forward to a better future. How much harder is it to fight for the rights of the non-existent?

Yes somehow we must. We have to forget ourselves and call upon our sense of compassion and our notion of Justice to do the right thing. For this is absolutely the most important issue to fight for today.

You know the lines in that famous movie Indepndence Day?

That’s never been more true then it is today. Only we’re not fighting for OUR right to exist but that of our great great grandchildren. We’re fight for their freedom from annihilation. The rights of our SPECIES to exist.

Oh if only it were just invading Aliens. That’d be sooo much easier.

We have to ask ourselves, do we have the right to doom the future denizens of this planet to deal with the destruction of world we caused? Or do we have an obligation to do our best to keep our planet in as good a working order as we possibly can so that our progeny can enjoy the same opportunities as we do?

We have to decide. Unequivocally. Do future generations have the same rights that we do? Are we going to do what we can to protect them? Or will we just abandon them to their fate. And we have to decide soon. There’s not much time yet.