By Justin Roberts

Opinion Editor, ‘10

As Frank Herbert said, “change is the only constant”. Still, one cannot deny that it comes with a particular anxiety to our generation. Welcome to the age of Global Capitalism, where the forces that once bound society’s traditions have been displaced by the profit making drive.

Skeptical? Consider how the world’s people communicate. There is not one language or idea as pervasive and well understood as capitalism.  Instead, our lingua franca is the market’s currency exchange rate. Nothing is understood without first being converted to cash value and then evaluated for its cost/benefit potential. We do this because we must, because economy is now tied to the most basic foundation of human life and because we will wither and die without it.

Is that necessity enough to justify the injustices these forces create? Capitalism’s human rights contributions far exceed its abuses. Without the capital and the products the market provides, none of the technology, the medicine, the education, or the utilities that support our current quality of life would exist. The only thing worse than a life with capitalism is a life without it.

The market is not our enemy by default; post-industrial life is far more subtle. First understand that in order to benefit from capitalism, we have had to make the world more compatible to it. For most of human history, the inability to efficiently use our resources combined with a lack of sophisticated understanding of market forces.  The result were volatile economies and severely limited access to vital goods.

By industrializing the means of production, man vastly increased efficiency.  We were now able to make more products, services and cash-value available and greatly stabilizing the booms and busts of the inherently cyclical market. In the Post-industrial world (the last 50 years or so) we have come to rely on the potential for creating future value for that stability. Unfortunately, it seems that the people in charge of the credit markets (not to mention the population at large) have outspent the future’s potential.  Thus, we find ourselves in the current crisis.

Imagine that the world economy was a building that housed all of humanity and its businesses. As new transactions, production, etc. are made in the market, the building is under constant renovation.  A large part of the house’s foundation, the credit market, was really only a couple of strong balloons filled with high-pressure air. As the house continued to grow, the builders kept adding more air to the balloons. Inevitably, the combination of adding weight to the house and air to the balloons strained the foundation, causing the balloons to burst. Now, the house’s foundation is violently falling and the house’s structure is cracking, spilling bricks and glass everywhere, causing extensive damage to it and its inhabitants.

But this is not the worst of it; as the balloon foundations became ever more strained, the builders were trying something else. Efficiency in this building meant ensuring it could keep growing to accommodate its constantly growing population without growing too large and collapsing. Some of them, instead of ensuring the foundation could carry its load, began to make the new additions smaller and cheaper, giving some inhabitants much less than they would have gotten before. This current crisis is making this method more and more favored, leading economists to think that the future will hold great reductions in quality of life.

As we struggle to stay afloat amid the economic turbulence, reevaluation is clearly in order.  Will we once more bend capitalism to our will or is man condemned to be a creature of the market?