Is Capitalism a Literal Death Cult?

Should we all be capitalists, communists, or socialists?

It’s a false trichotomy!

Today we’re going to pick on capitalism for a bit; not because communism or socialism are better — they aren’t — but because capitalism is the dominant Mammonomic system of our time.

I remember when I first fell in love with capitalism. I was in the eighth grade. My class was part of a nationwide stock-picking competition. For weeks, I studied the investment section of the Toronto Star, teaching myself about market caps and P/E ratios and all that nonsense. While the other students in my class picked at random, I made my picks based on the best securities analysis my pre-Internet 13-year-old-self could muster. I bet heavily on Barrick Gold. I forget why, but I feel like it had something to do with an upcoming merger. The awards days came… and I got thumped by classmates who picked at random. I was embarrassed, and furious. So I kept following the stock. Sure enough, by spring it had nearly doubled. My $10,000 play portfolio would’ve bought me a fake car!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, “Well, capitalism is the best system we’ve got.” This is so sad to hear. They’ve bought into a lie. And they clearly haven’t learned or understood the biblical principles that create far better economic systems than capitalism. (Or maybe they have, and are just happy to ignore them.)

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is an economic system where private individuals own and control the means of production, driven by the profit motive and free market competition.

(Under communism, the state owns everything. Socialism is a mix of private and state ownership.)

When did capitalism start?

People say capitalism is only a few hundred years old, basically since the formation of the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s, but the reality is that powerful individuals throughout history have claimed private ownership, controlled the means of production, were driven by profit, and had endless competition. Capitalism has existed throughout history, from ancient merchants in Mesopotamia and Rome to the artisans and traders of Medieval times. Economists now call this proto-capitalism.

With the popularization of the steam engine, we transitioned to industrial capitalism and the great age of raping the earth and building things, but that age is now being rapidly devoured by the form of capitalism we have today, called financial capitalism or shareholder capitalism. Through stock markets and private equity shareholding, investor ownership dominates human life and politics, prioritizing the maximization of shareholder value above literally everything else on earth, including human wellbeing, indigenous rights, worker protections, health, the poor, clean water, breathable air, democracy, you name it.

Here are eleven reasons why capitalism is not a moral or mathematically-sustainable, and why, in fact, it’s downright dangerous:

1. Capitalism is founded on selfishness

Capitalism’s founding tenet is every man seeking his own self-interest.

Let me read you a verbatim quote from a book that is supposedly about biblical economic policy, written by two economists at a Christian university:

“People make themselves and their neighbors richer by seeking their own self-interest.”

Does that sound right to you? I immediately thought, “Show me the receipts!”

But instead of making their case from Scripture, the authors backed up their lie by turning to an Enlightenment deist named Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, who falsely believed in an “invisible hand” that somehow magically turned individual selfishness into common good. Here’s what Smith says:

“By pursuing his own interest, [man] frequently promotes that of the society… It is not from benevolence… but from their regard to their own interest.”

This is obviously appalling to people of goodwill. Smith believed that individuals pursuing their own self-interest in a free market acted like an invisible hand that unintentionally benefits society as a whole by providing goods, services, and economic activity, as if guided by an unseen force. If this sounds like magical thinking, it’s because it is. Does any rational human being really believe that people being selfish is what’s best for society?! In reality, Smith’s “invisible hand” is the demon of greed.

It is REALLY scary that shareholders have restructured society so that the #1 question everyone is asking themselves every single day is, “What’s in it for me? How does this benefit me? How does this create a return for me?” It’s a wild departure from some of the actual most important questions: “How does this manifest ultimate truth, justice, and reality? How does this improve the world? How does this love others?”

2. “The market”… which is just the place where buyers and sellers buy and sell… is founded on the monopoly of disproportional resources, which creates a power imbalance that ensures coercion

There can never truly be a free market when land and resources have been monopolized, because buyers always start from a disadvantaged and coerced position. That’s why landlords have the upper hand on tenants, bankers have the upper hand on borrowers, shareholders have an upper hand on workers, and corporations have the upper hand on customers. Landlords have all the houses, bankers have all the money, shareholders have all the factories, and corporations have all the goods. When the selling party controls disproportionate resources, the buyer is always at a disadvantage.

3. Capitalism is founded on supply and demand

To raise prices amidst great need is sinful and sociopathic behavior. Capitalism actually incentivizes the suppression of supply and the maximization of demand… think: limiting housing development while skyrocketing immigration, or companies buying up and shutting down competitors… which has created sickening amounts of extra poverty for many, and excess cost for all.

4. Capitalism thrives on privatizing gains to the self, while externalizing costs to others

The Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou famously observed that when the production of an item generates negative externalities, the private market will overproduce the item, even beyond what is socially optimal! In other words, capitalism makes it easy, acceptable, and wildly lucrative to turn a profit despite horrible costs for others. Examples include industrial overfishing, cigarette production, and the oil industry filling the ocean and our bodies with microplastics.

5. Capitalist businesses produce what is most profitable, not what is most necessary

Millions of people starve to death each year because there’s almost no profit in nutritious food production, but there are massive fortunes to be seized in making luxury goods. Elevating the desires of the rich instead of meeting the needs of the poor. We should never favor the rich.

Similarly, capitalist shareholders invest not in what is most necessary, but what is most profitable. If it’s more profitable to invest in arms manufacturing than healthy, organic, sustainable food for poor communities, the majority of capitalists will invest in war… and their lobbyists will ensure they get it. If it’s more profitable to invest in low-quality, dehumanizing rental tower blocks than high-quality genuinely-affordable community developments for resale to lifelong locals, the majority of capitalists will invest in landlording.

Remember, economics is all about the allocation of resources. For capitalists, shareholder profit drives the allocation of resources. The allocation of resources should be driven by love, justice, fairness, generosity, the real needs of the poor, and creational wellbeing.

6. Capitalism seeks to maximize shareholder profits, not maximize consumer quality

Or increase quantity. Or to lower consumer prices. Capitalism is inherently selfish and self-focused… this Mammonomics system is purposefully not generous, self-sacrificial, or others-focused. Capitalism puts shareholders first. Not the suppliers without whom there would be no product. Not the workers without whom there would be no product or service. Not the customers without whom there would be no sales. Capitalist shareholders put themselves first.

7. Shareholder capitalism is just financial colonization by another name… it’s the monopolizing of resources and wealth and capital in order to extract more resources and wealth and capital

Remember the Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation? It was the first colonial power in Asia. The English East India Company quickly followed. The entire Indian subcontinent containing hundreds of millions of people was eventually colonized by shareholders and ruled from a single boardroom in London.

Shareholder capitalism is financial colonization. It’s the exploitation of common resources and human work in the pursuit of personal profit. Compound these extractions long enough and eventually civilization collapses, just like ancient Rome did under debt peonage or pre-revolution France did under rents. It’s inescapable math. The Bible says that all sin leads to death, and capitalism isn’t the grand exception. Capitalism is driven by “more” instead of “enough.” Capitalism metastasizes like cancer. Capitalism is a cult of growth-forever.

8. Shareholder capitalism only values the kinds of work that maximally enrich shareholders, not what leads to societal and creational flourishing

That’s why bankers and fund managers can get paid 100Xs more than farmers and builders, even though we could easily live without banking and asset management, but would rapidly die without food and shelter.

Shareholder capitalism would have humanity believe whoever is paid the most money must have contributed the most value to society. This is obviously a lie. The richest people alive are not centa-billionaires because they did more work, but because they monopolized more assets. No shareholder billionaire has ever earned their fortune and there’s a simple way to test this: How large would Jeff Bezos’s or Elon Musk’s net worth be… without the hundreds of thousands of suppliers and workers who made Tesla and Amazon what they are today. None of us would’ve ever heard of either men. If none of these sprawling globalist multinational corporations ever existed, all of these workers still would’ve had jobs… often for more pay and much better working conditions because of fewer massive monopolies killing competition and evading taxation.

But that’s a subject to unpack another time. The things that are actually of highest value are very different from the things that are of the highest value in the empire of Mammon. Shareholder capitalism puts the highest value on that which maximizes shareholder wealth.

Why not love for the poor, love for widows, love for orphans, love for prisoners, love for the sick and hungry and thirsty? None of this is profitable or valuable to shareholder capitalism. Capitalist shareholders put themselves first.

As if it’s anything more than a chance for bank shareholders to make profits by lending money to governments so they can pay the shareholders of arms manufacturers to make weapons to kill people.

It’s almost like capitalism is all about incentives and there are powerful incentives to continuously murder human beings. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

9. Capitalism defines all of life in terms of capital

It subjects everything to the value of exchange. It puts a price tag on everything and everyone. It commodifies all of life. It makes us buy and sell instead of giving with generosity, receiving with gratitude, serving, and acting like a family.

10. The goal of capitalists is to increase their capital

That’s why they fight endlessly against taxation and any form of social safety net for the landless poor. Capitalists say with their actions, “Let them either be exploited or let them be homeless. Let them starve. Let them die.” If a human being can’t create lots of surplus value for shareholders, they are worth less. If a human being can’t create any surplus value for shareholders, they are worthless. If a human being is actually a drain on surplus value for shareholders, they are hated as a liability, not as an honor and opportunity to serve a member of our global family.

I’m sure many of us can see the massive problem that’s rapidly approaching. Shareholder capitalism only values work that enriches shareholders. But capitalist technologists are rushing to replace human labor with AI and robotic labor. What happens as more and more people become economically unviable? The typical capitalist line is to ignore the hundreds of millions who suffer during the transitional generations and assure us that, in the long run, technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. But can we really be sure that this will hold true when we reach a point never seen before in human history, when a machine can do everything of economic value better than a human can?

I could go on. As you can see, all the core aspects of capitalism are the opposite of that which leads to widest-spread wellbeing.

Capitalism, communism, and socialism all have poison pills that make them non-starters for reasonable people.

We need a better way.