Capitalists Do Not Need to Be Evil — Because the System Itself Is
You will frequently hear conservatives, whether they themselves are wealthy or not, defending the character of capitalists by saying it’s wrong to consider them evil. The most common defense? Read this carefully: They’re just doing their jobs.
That is absolutely true. And the nature of the system makes their actions and their jobs evil in practice even if their intention is simply fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities (read: chasing profits at any cost). But their overall character is ultimately unimportant because the mad acquisition to keep accumulating more and more wealth, and what it takes to acquire it, will make potentially anyone necessarily indifferent to the suffering of others.
Whether you actually enjoy the suffering of other people is irrelevant if the nature of the system you must operate under forces you to consider the welfare of others, and even the greater good in general, to be something beneath your concerns.
In fact, capitalism forces all of us to compromise our ethics at one time or another. If you run even a small business, you do that on a semi-regular basis because you have no other choice if you are serious about making a profit. And even non-profit organizations need to be wary of fiscal matters in a system where virtually everything hinges upon the availability of money*.
*And I won’t mention the number of corrupt individuals in NGOs and government offices alike who skim donated money to give themselves and friends or family a sizable income that seriously cuts into the available funds. Whoops, I actually did just mention it!
Ben Shapiro Shills for His Fellow 1 Percenters
You saw such a defense of capitalist behavior from Ben Shapiro, the wealthy conservative commentator, attorney, movie mogul, and editor emeritus of the (now rapidly failing) news outlet The Daily Wire. A good recent example of Shapiro doing this followed Luigi Mangione being accused of the shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, an insurance company notorious for denying claims and devastating the physical, mental, and financial health of many sick working class people as a result.
Hmmm, does Mr. Shapiro and his family have to worry about affording health care if they get sick or hurt? Of course, the commodification of this grave necessity doesn’t bother him because conservatives use money as a metric to measure the worth of everyone and everything.
To be clear, I do not condone vigilante assassinations of anyone. However, let us look at the defenses given to capitalists like Thompson who help their company make a profit by ruining the lives of people in the only “First World” country plagued by a privatized medical industry in the words of Shapiro:
… The only way you kill someone like Brian Thompson is by suggesting that he is motivated not by a desire to keep the company working and operative in a very difficult regulatory environment… and you can disagree with his decisions and think they’re wrong… but instead you say he’s evil and he’s just trying to maximize profit.
Um, Ben, maximizing profit is what all companies have to do under capitalism. They exist for no other reason; they operate for a literal price. Hence, their filthy rich executives do not have the option of “playing nice”; none of us who operate a business really have the option of doing anything fully ethical.
And when we’re talking about the commodification of industries that people desperately need to survive, maximizing profit at the expense of people’s well-being is a destructive, anti-social act that can be termed evil in its end results.
You may be correct that Thompson and many (if not most) of his ilk are not motivated by an actual desire to hurt other people simply because they’re nasty bastards who get off on it. But the actions required of them nevertheless do this very thing.
And it’s all due to a system based on production for profit, reliance on making or having money to move any resources, and judging “success” and providing material comforts & security on the basis of who has the most of it.
It therefore requires people working in these industries to have a marked indifference to human suffering. As a result, no one in the working class who has suffered because of this really gives a shit whether or not these executives enjoyed the suffering of the people or not. The point remains that they did the action and were compelled to do it by a system whose requirements consider the suffering of human beings to be irrelevant to its basic operating procedure.
And as I noted in a previous article, this occurs in a post-Industrial world of such advanced technology that it is no longer materially justified to commodify any damn thing because we can now mass produce an abundance for all. Nor is it justified to have this potentially labor-saving and life-saving automation privately owned and controlled by a handful of people. The material necessity and usefulness of money and the commodification of everything is a ship that sailed with the coming of the Industrial Revolution.
As Sabby Sabs put it in the video linked below in response to Shapiro’s defensive statements against demonizing capitalists:
Their goal is to maximize profits and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process. … Because if you cared who got hurt in the process, you wouldn’t deny all these [medical] claims. And that’s one of the things we mentioned about UnitedHealthcare, that they were notorious for denying claims. They had the highest percentage of claim denial compared to other health insurance companies.
I worked in the health insurance field… and I can tell you that they were notorious for rejecting claims and not paying; like, they were bad! Cigna was bad, but they [UnitedHealthcare] were the worst.
And it was just like with this particular subject, it seemed like Ben really did not meet the moment. Because what he failed to understand is that— and I don’t think he gets it, because he’s pretty wealthy — what he failed to understand is that health care is not a Right or Left issue; that there are people on the Left and the Right who have fallen into medical debt, medical bankruptcy… that have had their claims denied.
Like, these insurance companies don’t care what your political ideology is. And it was like he really did not meet the moment.
Ben Shapiro’s Most Recent Meltdown
In other words, what difference does it make what the intentions of a capitalist happens to be, whether they’re actually sociopaths or not, if the actions they must take on behalf of making a profit are themselves sociopathic in nature?
Hence, being a sociopath who devalues the lives of other people, particularly those who are “lower” on the economic rung and whose best interests are seen to be “in the way” of making a profit, would actually help rather than impede someone in being a better high-rung business executive. But in the end it doesn’t matter if you’re actually a sociopath or not if you routinely engage in such behavior as a necessity of your job.
What Trump’s First 100 Days in Office Tells Us
The Republican wing of the Duopoly wanted the working class, and they got it in November of 2024 after the Democrats’ dismal failure (read: adamant refusal) to take care of our economic needs and keep us out of constant wars.
After Trump did a few things his multitude of voters wanted him to do, such as get rid of DEI programs that fueled Left Woke policies and a needed immigration reform, he then quickly reverted to type… that is, capitalist-type.
Specifically, he created a “big, beautiful bill” (his words, certainly not mine) that he claimed would eliminate “wasteful” spending in social programs… which, of course, amounted to breaking a campaign promise not to cut programs the poor are in extreme need of, including Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps).
And also making outrageous work requirements for Medicaid that harken back to Clinton’s infamous “workfare” requirements that were initially part of his ultra-right-wing “Welfare Reform” bill that effectively created a form of legal slave labor out of welfare recipients and threatened the paying jobs of numerous employed workers.
The reality is that people more often need to go on Medicaid when they lose a job, not while they’re working. Many who are working are dependent on their employer for medical insurance (assuming they’re allowed to work full time and provided with it). Those who are out of work can least afford not to have medical coverage in our for-profit health industry.
That money taken from funding such needed programs for the workers were then funneled upwards into the military and into the coffers of the already super-wealthy via more huge tax breaks. As usual.
Trump and his capitalist confederates ignored what fellow conservatives Steve Bannon and Thomas Massie tried to tell him… that many of their MAGA supporters are on Medicaid. This shows how the entire working class is screwed by these pro-corporate policies conducted by both wings of the Duopoly.
They distract us with the Culture Wars and then show us how class conscious all the capitalists are by constantly taking more from us and giving what little we have to themselves, particularly for our for-profit “defense” industry. Just imagine if we the working class shared that class consciousness.
Why would Trump enact a scheme that devastated his popularity rating among the working class and caused a rift among his followers? Because allowing capitalists to run our society according to their needs at the expense of our own is the only script they can see themselves following. Their many capitalist donors demand this of them, and the working class is still far too fixated on and divided over petty cultural issues and misled by pro-capitalist propaganda to rise up in opposition.
So, they continue to get away with it because we continue to let them get away with it.
Bill Burr Says it Best
As comedian Bill Burr put it so eloquently:
And as the commentator Hell on Earth explains the above on Facebook: “Bill Burr is right. No one working full time should struggle to afford rent, and an economy that forces people into multiple jobs just to survive is broken.”
Yet, here we are. And we’re exactly where the conservatives think we should be?
So, What Has Reliance on Money Done for Your Life?
Be honest here. How well are you prospering due to your need to have money to do everything? Is your job paying you nearly enough to keep up with everyday expenses? How about rent, your mortgage, or your property taxes (both city and county)? How about having enough to eat? How about affording that car, or paying for Uber if you do not have one?
How secure are you in having everything you need tomorrow, let alone anything you may want for comfort? What is all of the above doing for your mental stability?
How many friends and family do you have that are dealing with mental health issues largely because of their financial struggles and being compelled to work so many hours per week at a job that doesn’t pay them enough to buy every commodified item they need, let alone fulfill their simple, reasonable wants?
How many feel compelled to do some outrageous things to make more money?
Like, sleeping with this or that person in exchange for money?
To steal from others?
To run a hustling scheme?
To throw time and resources away on get rich quick schemes?
To struggle with starting a small business and actually make it profitable rather than draining their already short supply of money against the multitude of competitive fellow workers out there struggling to do the same thing?
To engage in criminal activities like drug dealing? Or become addicted to drugs as an escape from a brutal reality — which only further drains their money supply?
Does having to rely on money in a post-industrial era where we can, for the first time in human history, produce an abundance for all really make any sense at this point?
Is this system really working out for the majority of us? Seriously, where do you see your life in five years considering how it’s going right now?
Should we really continue voting to keep these billionaires in control of everything? Should we really keep playing by their rules instead of coming up with far better ones for ourselves? I mean, we outnumber these bastards well over a billion to one. Why should their needs matter more than ours? Why should they be the only ones to live like all of us should live?
How much misery is it going to take before we realize that capitalism is a system that is past its time, and it needs to go?
As long as capitalism continues to exist, we can expect very bad and even “evil” behavior from those who control it and run the show. What they do and are compelled to do by the rules of the system make their actual character underneath it all irrelevant.
The only difference between capitalism and cannibalism is the spelling.
Well said