Roger Hill writes:
Clearly, there are those who do not wish any coercive restraints placed on the economic freedoms of individuals, but who sincerely believe there are natural restraints on all profit ventures in the very exercise of mere economic realities themselves.
These people would be called capitalists, and this is the mindset of all capitalists. That there are natural limits on profits is not particularly interesting when we see environments completely destroyed, massive slums as far as the eye can see, millions dying every year of starvation and lack of health care, countless dying from tainted products and unsafe structures and streets, countless sickened, injured and killed in their own workplaces, on and on. That all of this happens even with some sort of “natural profit limit” is not particularly interesting nor is it enlightening. Clearly, the natural limits of capitalist profits are far too high to be of benefit to any decent society.
The “natural limits of profit” produced the Irish Potato Famine, starve 14 million humans to death every year, and logically produce such catastrophes as Nairobi, Lagos, Rio de Janiero, Mexico City, Detroit, Dhaka and Calcutta.
Clear-cut rainforests, nearly extinct fish stocks, global climate catastrophe, sewage choked rivers, rivers that catch on fire, hundreds of miles of grasslands desertified by bovine locusts with hooves, flaming and collapsing sweatshops with hundreds of charred and flattened corpses, the fetid slums of Bogota, Lima and Sao Paolo: this is what the “natural limits of profit” give us. These natural limits gave us hundreds of years of slavery. Surely those slaves could find a glimmer of hope that their masters’ profits were being restrained by some natural limits, else their fate be even worse?
Roger Hill:
For example, what constitutes ‘restraints on profit’? Are these restraints enforced by coercion – in other words, by law and the power of the state?
Yes, one definition of a socialist is one who is willing to constrain the profits of capitalism via state regulation. And in a capitalist economy, the only possible decent society can be had by socialists in government running and regulating the capitalist economic engine. Allowing the capitalists to move from a mode of economic development to a form of governance via the capitalist state (where the capitalists run the state) quickly creates economic crisis and eventually results in some sort of a 3rd world system.
