Capitalism is failing us – it’s time to get more creative
The myth that policies and practices radically focused on capitalist free enterprise would raise the wealth of all, creating a trickle-down effect, seems to survive despite the evidence to the contrary.
Most serious economists show that there is a flood of wealth upwards. The beneficiaries of the fruits of raw capitalist thinking see poverty as a regrettable by-product of the way the world works.
We seem incapable of thinking more creatively, creating a world that works for everyone.
We have difficulty in thinking about poverty not just as an aberration – as something we might solve – rather than acknowledging that our privileges are located on the same map as the suffering of the poor.
We have an obligation not to support people in poverty but to provide for them genuine freedom of opportunity. The poor have been cheated of what they deserve.
Did the Irish government genuinely believe that they were setting all people free by deregulating the banks, weakening the bargaining power of the unions, reducing tax on the wealthy and the level of support for the sick, old and vulnerable?
Ireland’s obsession with the past, however nobly conceived, tends to kill off our capacity for political innovation with the result that we fail to see the damage done by poverty, resulting in the entrapment of so many in worlds where their capabilities are killed.
We persist in assuming that the working of the market in our economy must be left untouched. The pursuit of money is made to be imperative, turning us, without noticing, into people we do not wish to be.
We readily imbibe the philosophy that money is not the root but the cure of all ills.
The worship of the market, where money is assumed to buy everything worthwhile, arises not from human greed but from the moral vacuum that has characterised public discourse.
The renewal of our public life requires the exercise of the traditional virtues of self-giving and self- denial. These are human dispositions that money cannot buy.
Philip O’Neill
Oxford, England