Did you know that the left’s entire pretentious world view collapses without the support of capitalist innovation? Well, that’s what they keep saying over at Quora, which is supposed to be an answers website, but is more like a hell-hole of competing propaganda.
My understanding of this idea is that the capitalist is supposedly special because they are the class of people that has the ability to innovate, and then our whole economic system rewards them for innovating. The implication is that this capitalist innovation is what makes the world move forward, so without a capitalist class, the world cannot move forward. Moving forward seems to mean things getting better, especially in terms of technology. Some people also intend this to mean that the world moves forward socially, but most people who are fans of capitalism believe that there’s an apex of human society that we have already reached and that things cannot get any better because humans are naturally awful and irredeemable — but only at the group level. At the individual level, these people believe that everyone can improve.
There’s so much wrong with this that it is hard to know where to start, but let’s start with the capitalists being special because they can innovate. People like to say that necessity is the mother of invention, but that’s not accurate either. Anyone can innovate if they have: 1) Resources, and 2) Time — and really, time is just another resource. The type of innovation that occurs is guided by what the innovator sees as being needed by society. It’s certainly true that capitalists have more opportunity to innovate in the sense that they are not working, so they have lots of time, and they control vast resources, so they have the opportunity to manifest any ideas they might have. However, there’s nothing magically good and unique about the capitalist’s body or mind that makes them more able to innovate.
The idea that certain people are born better at innovating isn’t just incorrect, it’s also a form of eugenics and a manifestation of narcissistic culture. Eugenics is this idea that you should interfere with society to arrange human reproduction so that certain heritable characteristics are increased in the population and others are decreased. If we’re pretending that some people are naturally (i.e., genetically) better at innovating, and that innovating makes you superior, then you want those people to receive more resources with the assumption that their genetic lines will become more numerous and protected from adverse conditions that might destroy the gene line — and that is eugenics, which is the underpinning of pseudo-scientific racism. Narcissistic culture assumes that some people are just better than other people by merely existing even if they don’t really improve the lives of other people. Within a narcissistic culture, each individual will tend to believe that they are one of the naturally better people, so you end up with everyone thinking they are better than everyone else. It’s a world of assholes.
The funny thing, though, is that despite having all this opportunity to innovate in terms of time and resources, capitalists do not innovate more than other people, and when they do innovate, their ideas are just as likely as anyone else’s to be bad or just a rehash of a pre-existing idea. Moreover, most innovation that is attributed to a capitalist was actually performed by someone they employed. Paying someone to innovate is not the same as being an innovator. Sometimes, the capitalist purchases the right to say they innovated something despite someone else having done the innovating (see Elon Musk and his false claim that he founded Tesla). Some of the best innovations of the past hundred years were in fact created by people employed by the government that then passed those ideas on to private companies controlled by capitalists who then took credit for those innovations.
Related: 5 important inventions you didn’t know were NASA spinoffs
Do capitalist innovations (in the sense of any innovation that a capitalist benefits from) improve the world? Most do not — but you don’t remember most of the ones that were flops. Like Lady Gaga Oreos. Remember that? The only reason I remember that one is that it was so outlandishly stupid. Like, what does Lady Gaga taste like, exactly? What is her flavor? I never found out because I didn’t buy them.
What is it that capitalists do?
Most of the time, capitalists do absolutely nothing of value for other people. In most cases, the talent of the capitalist is having a good eye for investment opportunities; i.e., they don’t innovate, but they do notice innovations of others and attach themselves to those projects in a way that helps the project move forward while also making the capitalist even more wealthy. Again, though, being able to identify a good idea is not a talent unique to the capitalist class! Most people have a pretty good idea about which ideas are likely to be popular, they just aren’t sitting on a mountain of cash that they can throw at those potentially-popular ideas. The only reason capitalists are making the decisions about which innovations to support is because they are already wealthy.
This does not address the American ideal of the innovator, though, and those people sometimes exist. What about them? Let’s say you are Randall Peltzer, and you have innovated a handy gizmo for the traveling professional that puts all the tools needed in the bathroom together in a single device. You call it the Bathroom Buddy and it would be a big hit if only you had a million dollars to start production, get some marketing materials out in the public eye, and so forth. What do you do? Well, you go to the bank where a capitalists decides if your innovation is worthy, and if they decide it is, they get a huge chunk of the profits from your innovation. Under capitalism, the capitalist rarely innovates, but always decides which innovations are produced.
Banking is the core of capitalism, and is controlled by capitalists. Even the US Federal Reserve Bank is largely independent of the government, even though it claims to be “accountable” — but remember that the government itself is controlled by capitalists who are legally allowed to bribe politicians (including the Supreme Court). So, the capitalist bribes the government in order to control staffing of the Federal Reserve, which is then independent from the government so that it can best serve the needs of the capitalists without interference from the voters. The whole point of capitalism is that capitalists get to control everything because they control the capital, and the banks themselves are the most important part of that control.
I’ve seen people say that the moment someone mentions banking (and especially global banking), you should ignore them because they’re secretly antisemitic, and then, typically, they also imply that concern about banks is silly. The whole reason why fascists distract you with anti-Jewish conspiracies, though, is to point you away from the real concentrations of power that affect your life. They want to control those concentrations of power, not destroy them. As a result of their lies, either you end up attacking the wrong people, or you start believing that there are no concentrations of power. Either of those outcomes is good from the perspective of the capitalist, who is real, and probably not Jewish.
Let me say it again: Global banking is a real problem. Bankers do take decision-making power away from you and are anti-democratic. There is no single ethnic group that controls banking. Global banking is not a conspiracy because it is happening out in the open and it isn’t as organized as the word “conspiracy” would imply.
Certainly, investing resources in an innovative project does require people to make that resource allocation decision. Resources don’t just allocate themselves. But why should it be capitalists — who are not smarter than other people and who are clearly more selfish than the average person — are the people who make these decisions? Instead, decisions about how to allocate resources should be more democratic. Even if you disagree that resource allocation should be democratized, there’s no justification for why capitalists should be the group that should make those decisions for everyone. Even if you think the market has special properties that allow it to sort out resource allocation, capitalists are not the market; in fact, they are overly powerful (anti-democratic) actors within the market that distort it and a truly free market would be democratic (in a consumerist sense).
Here’s the thing: People who are in favor of capitalism are against democracy. It’s as simple as that. They think people (but not themselves) are stupid and evil, so democracy just can’t work. The con that we have collectively fallen for is called the Virtue of Selfishness, and by that logic, it is the most selfish of us that are the most virtuous and should therefore be in charge. But in fact, putting the worst (most selfish) of us in charge has created a dystopia that is getting worse every day.