George Humphries and Harold Rushden wrote to say Capitalism is the only system which can work and that “man is inherently greedy and selfish”. Mr Rushden says we have a natural inclination to capitalism.
We don’t.
Capitalism has only been the dominant system for roughly 300 years. Humans have been around for about 200,000 years. It’s odd that a “natural inclination” should be hidden for so long.
For over 90 per cent of human existence people lived in what anthropologists call hunter gather societies. There is plenty of evidence that these were egalitarian societies where individuals who acted selfishly or boastfully were educated through methods like ridicule.
Our society has the greediest in charge. The briefest look at capitalism reveals multiple lunacies. For instance; the richest 85 people have the same wealth as the poorest half of the planet.
Before capitalism, people would have been amazed at the idea of a crisis when too much is produced. But now food is destroyed to protect market prices and profit while people starve.
Capitalists sack workers because of “overproduction” like at Honda. We are expected to make sacrifices to pump up profit for a super-rich minority.
Harold Rushden closes by referring to people who say human survival depends on that system. But it should be obvious that under capitalism the greed of the minority leads to war and environmental destruction.
Peter Smith, Woodside Avenue, Swindon
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