• Ashwin Poonawala
    54
    The system of democracy is founded on the basis of diffusion of state’s power, curtailing the power’s potential for injustice. The dazzling success of the system has made the concepts of democracy and capitalism popular around the world. The existing form of capitalism worked very well for a while, because then, profit making power could not converge easily into a few hands. Industrialization has changed that. Now a few rich have undesirably high power to manipulate wealth distribution and politics. Unrestrained capitalism defeats the essence of Free Enterprise, which is competition.
    Through mergers and absorptions, large businesses corner markets and products. Their lobbying and string-attached election contributions influence the politics, thereby giving free hand to manipulate economy to enhance profits. The existing degenerate environment of greed forces new entrepreneurs to compromise their moral convictions and adopt cunning ways, propagating the corrupt ways down to the lower levels of economy.

    Processed food is made unhealthy with harmful preservatives and cheap ingredients. The quality of food in chain restaurants has degraded over the years. The farm produce is made unhealthy by high-breeding and the quality of dairy products by rampant use of hormones and antibiotics. This makes the nation fat and unhealthy, requiring more medical attention. On the other side, medical drugs/treatments are marketed at exorbitant prices, and once they are in circulation, our medical drug industry shows instances of suppressing and discouraging immerging cheaper/better remedies, and of suppressing discoveries of dangerous side effects. The common man is getting squeezed from every side. The subtle influence of the rich on our legislature keeps our tax code from correcting the loop holes, which favor the rich heavily. This keeps the taxes of the less affluent high, and the entitlement programs strained. Our automobile industry ignored, or bought and shelved technical innovations, to avoid prerequisite expensive modifications to production processes, loosing against foreign competition in the end, retarding the country’s progress. Our society is losing from every side.

    As globalization advances, the economic gap between the developed and underdeveloped economies of the world keeps shrinking. This is eating away the advantage the rich countries enjoyed. The resulting tightening profit conditions within the rich countries make their big businesses tend to exploit domestic consumers by low quality products and by shortchanging the employees. This keeps lowering the standard of living of the masses.

    We need a way to defuse the power of money on economic decision-making, releasing the economic factors from the narrow channels of money flow that keep empowering the economically high and mighty. The diffusion needs to be effected without blocking individual’s ability to acquire wealth, which motivates economic production. It is best to achieve this economic power diffusion with least interference from other entities, like continued meddling by the government.

    Countries around the world try it in varying degrees and by different combinations. But so far most of the experiments have tried to shift the control from money to authority. USSR was an extreme example of this. This cannot work for long, because human greed has a high tendency to take over the process.

    One way to achieve this could be by limiting the number of persons any business can employ. In conjunction with this there has to be a limit to the maximum percentage interest an individual can own in all other businesses.
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