A lot of cars I
ride in have a gauge on the dashboard called a "tachometer." It tells
how fast the engine is running, using "rpm" (revolutions per minute)
as the unit of measurement. My car seems to operate in the 1000 to 2000 range
most of the time. The engine can run a lot faster than that. Toward the end of
the gauge the scale turns red--DANGER. If your engine is running fast enough to
get into that range, the engine might destroy itself.
I suppose any
piece of moving machinery is in danger of running out of control and destroying
itself. Some people used to install a gadget called a "governor" on
their cars--a device that would keep the engine from running past a certain
limit.
Our economy is a
runaway engine. We do not seem to be able to slow it down enough to keep it
from destroying our environment. Every person in the economy is under pressure
to produce more and more, faster and faster. That is how we measure
"productivity." Productivity is supposed to make all of us wealthier.
So we pile up material things. Our landfills get bigger and bigger. We waste
more and more on packaging, and these days, we spend more and more on moving stuff
from one place to another. It is becoming possible for every meal we eat to be
delivered to our door.
That is
capitalism. It baptizes greed.
"Greed"
is a moral term, not pleasant to hear. We prefer words like
"incentive." Capitalism incentivizes everything. But the more we
incentivize, the more we are digging our own graves--in our landfills. We need
a governor.
I think I have a
candidate for such a governor. The governor that could slow down our
overly-incentivized economy is a rule that everything we do should take account
of what it does to other people.
We already do a
lot of that. We do not let people pave over wetlands, because we know that
wetlands are necessary to keep biological diversity intact. The norm against
paving over, which is challenged by capitalist enthusiasts, is broadly
supported, which means that we have a moral agreement about its value. We just
need to extend our thinking further, and pay attention to the costs of our
behavior that we are making other people pay instead of ourselves.
Another way to
look at this is to say that we need principles of accounting that take account
of the costs of what we do for everybody in the human community.
If every economic
decision were to take account of the effects that decision will have on every
person in the world, capitalism would slow down--it would be governed. Our
environment might be saved. As it is, if the engine does not slow down, it will
damage the environment so much that the whole structure will come crashing
down, and then capitalism will no longer be salvific but demonic. It is already
demonic for a large proportion of the world's population. It will just be demonic
for everybody. In the worst case scenario, the human race will become extinct.
We will not be the first species to disappear from the earth.
We don't need
socialism. We need capitalism under control.
