I Like Capitalism Because I Hate Companies

The way to get rich, back in the bad old days, was to (1) get yourself an army, (2) invade another country, and (3) steal all their shit. And then, in 1776 or so, this idea came about that to get rich you should (1) make something useful.

And so I like capitalism, but not because I have a hard-on for Coca-Cola executives. I think Coca-Cola executives, if they had their way, would have no moral compunctions about enslaving me to work in the Coca-Cola mines sixteen hours a day digging up Original Flavor™ emeralds in order to appease the cackling, conniving, cantankerous shareholders.

How lovely, then, capitalism is: this system which forces corporations to eat each other instead of us! Businesses red in tooth and claw, but instead of trying to fuck the little guy over, they’re trying to fuck each other over in order to serve the little guy—like a king! The hippie-dippie types talk about corporations controlling us. Listen, if corporations controlled us, McDonald’s would sell lettuce because it’s cheap and never fills you up. Corporations are contortionists bending to our every whim as quickly as humanly possible. They’re our slaves.

Of course of course of course I’m not naive about the second-order effects—the second-, third-, and zillionth-order effects. This isn’t Eden. Things are far from perfect. Amazon is at war with Alibaba to sell me a dishwasher, and it means I get a dishwasher for five hundred bucks, but the process involves reaming out the commercial districts of small towns, enslaving Amazon warehouse workers, and creating forty-eight thousand tons of carbon dioxide.

There are so, so, so many externalities. So many bad things. But I have to say: it’s better than mercantilism. It has to be. Come on.

In some ways it reminds me of art, really.

Debbie Downer says all the art humanity has ever produced is ugly, superficial, and mean because it’s just the result of primates playing status games. All the artists who ever lived just wanted to be famous, wanted respect, wanted to get laid, and doesn’t that drag art down into the muck with the rest of us pigs?

But Edna Upper realizes the status games were imposed on us, by evolution, against our will—and they came first. That’s very important, I think: the status games came first. And how wonderful that we’ve managed to transmogrify such selfish, sordid hungers into the Sistine Chapel.

I feel the same way about capitalism. After centuries of every flavor of Atilla the Hun raping and pillaging every village in existence, this system comes along and says, “Actually, to conquer the world, you have to improve it.” Capitalism has taken Atilla the Hun energy and funneled it into making you an iPhone. I’m not a fool. I know about the externalities. But that’s still pretty amazing.