This is another website’s summary of the arguments of Yorrick Blumenfeld, slightly modified. URL below.
Summary: Capitalism cannot be reformed, because its nature is destructive.
Capitalism erodes and corrupts democracy: Capitalism is fundamentally antidemocratic. Money controls Parliaments and politicians, not the other way around. Corporate money tends to buy the ability to write and engineer favourable legislation, as parties need money to campaign, and corporate sponsored think tanks decide the environment of thought. The highest bidder – which is usually a group of corporations – buys the government.
Drive to the Bottom: Capitalism pits small countries, states, and counties against each other, seeking special tax breaks and subsidies in highly wasteful “corporate welfare” programs. Capitalism seeks the lowest level of conditions for the people: cheap labour, cheap resources, cheap dumping of waste and cheap regulations.
Capitalism drives off accountability: The political strucutre of corporations shields upper level managers from accountability, while shareholders are protected from personal liability for damage done by the corporation in making the profit they share. Multinationals are not responsible to any electorate, or to governments that respect them. Corporations can always be elsewhere, when they are challenged – just as they take their profits away from where they are earned.
Capitalism’s values are insufficient: Capitalism doesn’t foster many things we value such as: ethics; controlling child labour; strict health and safety standards; reducing hours of labour; providing security for workers; preserving nature; or guaranteeing holidays and weekly breaks from labour. The market economy has failed to focus on durability and ecologically sustainable products and services, and it cannot because these count as costs, not profits. The only spiritual values capitalism can recognise are those that see money as a sign of God’s favour, demand obedience from workers, or generate sales.
It fails to serve the poor: This model underserves over three billion people. Two hundred plus years of capitalism have not brought about global prosperity or environmental balance. It has brought massive prosperity for the very wealthy. Most of the world’s current wealth is controlled by an extremely small number of people – which gives them even more power to govern in their interests alone.
Capitalism has a stability and debt accumulation problem: The supply of money is dependent on people and firms relying on loans and perpetually increasing their debt. Issuing interest requires endless economic growth to pay back the debt, which is neither in the national nor in the global interest. This inflated speculative debt drives the never-ending economic crises and bubble bursts. Without debt current capitalism would collapse. Most of the world’s monetary transactions are purely speculative: wealth is being burnt.
Corporations are subsidized and unaccountable: Capitalist companies are often heavily subsidized (including subsidized by the global ecology by making pollution and destruction an ‘externality’). They also avoid giving back to the community. For instance, corporations avoid taxes that support infrastructure fundamental to their expansion. They use shell companies, tax havens, and modern electronic transfers to shuffle capital around and evade responsibility and to avoid contributing to the life conditions they need. They are parasitic on healthy societies, which they help run down
Globalized capitalism creates local vulnerability: Globalized export-oriented high-tech capitalism undercuts national and regional self-reliance in key commodities. Heavy dependence on global supply lines for items such as food and energy creates a fragile and dangerous situation. Countries may not be able to feed themselves in the near future. Just like workers cannot be self-sufficient without jobs in capitalist organisations. Capitalism creates low resilience to crisis.
Capitalism undercuts diversity and threatens groups: It favours cultural homogenization as well as the homogenization of goods and services to advance market control and to increase profit through uniformity of production. By pushing consumerism and materialism and crushing all other value and survival systems, some would argue that capitalism inspires terrorism. At the least, undermining local conditions creates nationalisms, and fundamentalisms in response.
Capitalism ignores and destroys nature’s life support systems: Capitalism denies that the biosphere has any limits. By failing to internalize the costs of environmental pollution, and purposefully misleading people about the effects of pollution to further their profit, corporations drive a process that radically reduces planetary carrying capacity. Endless expansion of growth and destruction of resources and ecologies is destined to cause overshoot and collapse. Fisheries are over fished, land is over grazed, chemicals are pumped into the environment with little restraint or knowledge of effects, other minerals are extracted from the environment destructively with little attempt at rehabilitation. More waste clogs the land air and sea. The ‘invisible hand’ of corporate power has been destructive. Capitalism will almost certainly drive global suicide.
http://www.fdnearth.org/essays/capitalism-cant-be-reformed-try-the-incentive-economy/
Other points
Capitalism destroys commons: Capitalism produces the tragedy of the commons, in which common property is consumed and destroyed by profit seeking, because the only property that can be recognised is alienable private property. Capitalism enforces the idea that people should not cooperate to restrain the business of others when it impacts on them. Common-land is simply land to be exploited, and to be destroyed or polluted in order to cheapen the cost of production, as is the air and water. All cheap or free things tend to be undervalued, unless they can be monopolised. Capitalist theorists say they can solve all our problems by turning everything, including you, into private property. Then somebody will care. But capitalist property rights also include the right to destroy ‘your’ own property. If someone owns the air, then they can pollute it without challenge. However, if no one owns the air then everyone, especially the powerful, can pollute without challenge as well. Common property is of no value, yet it is the basis of all value.
Capitalism owns the law: for the same reason it owns politics. It buys the lawmakers, and exemptions from the law, so that law favours it’s actions. Similarly because law itself is a process involving lawyers, it can buy the best lawyers and exploit the incoherencies of law, and stretch out cases for such a long time that ordinary people are rendered bankrupt, and cannot afford to challenge the wealthy – even if the wealthy do break the law. The more the law can be bought the more wealth dominates.
Capitalism treats workers as a cost and considers them disposable: The aim of any capitalist enterprise is to deliver a profit and high salaries to those who run the organisation. It may also aim to return profit to shareholders. Workers are a cost. They diminish profit. Hence the amounts spent on them must be cut, and the conditions of work should be as cheap as possible. Thus the natural tendency of untouched capitalism is to reduce wages, extract more work from workers, and lower conditions of work.
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