The free market does not regulate itself; It devours.
Before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, capitalists sold chalk as milk. They mixed sawdust into bread to stretch the flour. They added borax to rotting meat to hide the smell. They put formaldehyde in milk to prevent souring. The “Swill Milk” scandal of the 1850s saw dairies feeding cows on distillery waste, producing blue-tinted milk that they whitened with chalk and plaster. Thousands of children died.1 This was not an accident. It was profit optimization. Adulteration was standard practice. The customer could not know. The customer could not choose. The customer died.
The “rational consumer” is a fantasy invented by economists who have never been poor. Consumers cannot know what they are buying. They cannot know that the milk contains chalk. They cannot know that the meat contains sawdust. They cannot know that the water contains lead. Information asymmetry means the seller always knows more than the buyer. The market is not a conversation between equals. It is a trap set by the powerful for the desperate.
The lie of “choice” sustains the whole structure. The free market evangelist says: “If you do not like the job, find another one. If you do not like the product, do not buy it.” But when the company owns the town, when the wages are scrip, when the alternative is starvation, there is no choice. When all the water is poisoned, you cannot choose clean water. When all the employers pay starvation wages, you cannot choose a living wage. Capitalism creates the conditions of desperation and then calls the response to desperation a “free choice.”
Before regulations, children worked in mines and factories. They still do in the supply chains that feed Western markets. The “free market” puts children to work because their fingers are small and their labor is cheap. They lose limbs. They lose lungs. They lose childhoods. This is what “economic freedom” means for capital: the freedom to exploit children.
We regulated our worst abuses out of existence. Then we moved them abroad. The sweatshops in Bangladesh that collapse and kill thousands.1 The cobalt mines in Congo where children dig for the minerals in our phones.3 The e-waste dumps in Ghana where workers burn electronics to extract metals and breathe poison.2 We still benefit from unadulterated capitalism. We just outsourced it to places where darker-skinned people die instead of us. The “free market” is free because the costs are borne by people we do not have to see.
Every regulation exists because someone died. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 workers because the owners locked the exits to prevent theft.5 The lock was cheaper than the guards. The bodies were the cost of doing business. The Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, none of these were passed because corporations felt generous. They were passed because people died in large enough numbers that the government was forced to act.
The factory dumps poison into the river. The community gets cancer. The company keeps the profit. The medical bills are paid by the victims. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed. Capitalism externalizes costs onto the public and privatizes profit for the shareholders. Pollution is not a side effect. It is a subsidy. The public pays for the damage so the company does not have to.
Flint, Michigan, was not an accident. The state switched to a cheaper water source to save money. They failed to treat it properly. They knew the pipes would corrode. They knew the water would be poisoned. They did it anyway.3 The children of Flint will carry the damage for the rest of their lives. The savings were calculated. The lives were not.
“I owe my soul to the company store” was not a metaphor. Coal towns. Mill towns. Workers paid in scrip, not currency. Scrip that was only good at the company store. Prices were inflated. Wages were withheld for rent, for tools, for fines. Workers fell into debt they could never repay. They could not leave. They were beaten if they tried. The “free market” meant the company was free and the worker was in bondage.
The gig economy is the company store reborn. No benefits. No security. No overtime. No protection. You are an “independent contractor.” You absorb all the risk. The company absorbs all the profit. If you get sick, you are replaceable. If you get injured, you are on your own. The app tracks your every move. The algorithm sets your wage. You cannot negotiate. You cannot organize. You cannot quit because you are already in debt. The chains are invisible now. The store is on your phone. But the bondage is the same.
Profit-driven healthcare means people die because they cannot afford insulin. The price of insulin in the United States is eight times higher than in comparable nations.4 A vial that costs $6 to produce sells for over $300. People ration their doses. They skip injections. They end up in emergency rooms with diabetic ketoacidosis. Some of them die. This is not rare. A 2022 study found that one in four insulin users has rationed the medication due to cost.5 The pharmaceutical companies know this. They adjust the price to maximize profit, not to maximize survival. The deaths are calculated into the business model.
Insurance companies are death panels. They employ armies of adjusters whose job is to deny claims. They use algorithms to identify treatments that can be rejected. They count on the fact that sick people are too exhausted to fight. When a claim is denied, the patient either pays out of pocket or goes without care. Some go without. Some die. The insurance company keeps the premium. The patient is buried. This is not an aberration. It is the system working exactly as designed. The profit motive and the Hippocratic oath are fundamentally incompatible. A corporation has a legal duty to maximize shareholder value. A doctor has a moral duty to save lives. In American healthcare, the corporation wins.
Medical bankruptcy does not exist in other developed nations. It is exclusively American. Over 60% of bankruptcies in the United States involve medical debt.6 People who did everything right, who worked hard, who had insurance, are destroyed by a single diagnosis. The system extracts their savings, their homes, their futures. It leaves them destitute. Then it blames them for not planning better. The “free market” for healthcare is a machine that grinds the sick into poverty and calls it efficiency.
If a person is desperate enough, they will sell a kidney. A cornea. Blood. Plasma. Bone marrow. We had to make this illegal. The fact that we had to make it illegal tells you everything. In a truly unregulated market, the rich would harvest the poor. They would buy organs from the destitute and sell them to the dying at a markup. This is not hyperbole. This is the logic of the market. If everything is for sale, then everything is for sale. The only question is price.
The fossil fuel industry knew about climate change in the 1970s. They buried the research. They funded denial. They made trillions while the planet burned.7 They are still doing it. This is unadulterated capitalism at civilizational scale. The profit is privatized; The apocalypse is shared. The industry will extract every last dollar while the world drowns, burns, and starves. And they will use that money to buy politicians who will ensure they never face consequences.
They say regulation stifles innovation. What they mean is regulation stifles profit. Innovation is finding new ways to poison people without getting caught. Innovation is finding new ways to extract labor without paying for it. Innovation is finding new ways to monetize desperation. The “disruption” they celebrate is the removal of the protections that previous generations bled for.
Unadulterated capitalism does not lead to prosperity. It leads to extraction. It leads to monopoly. It leads to company towns and poisoned water and sawdust bread and organs for sale. It leads to a world where everything is a commodity, including you. The only thing standing between you and being ground into profit is the regulations that capitalists are trying to dismantle.
And they are winning.
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As the saying goes:
“Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.”
MS, you have identified the problem as you see it: Capitalism
But you didn’t mention the solution.
I’m guessing something along the lines of “the warm embrace of collectivism” ?
Pretty sure one could write an essay of equal-to-worse issues with that system.
Not saying a lot of what you wrote aren’t problems.
But are the failings of human beings solved by running them centrally, by failed human beings?
Not sure how you get past the shortcomings of human nature by installing the ‘other’ system.
In theory, I am a socialist in one area: health care.
But Obama tried, was overrun by the health care lobbyists, and what we got was no better or maybe a bit worse.
Although the ‘pre-existing condition’ thing was monumental, no doubt about that.