Capitalism has one metric...
I'm really into metrics, and often say, "You grow what you measure." If I want to change something, I figure out how to measure it, I measure it, I do something, and I measure it again. I express a goal as a metric, act strategically in pursuit of that goal, relate those actions to movement in the metric, adjust and repeat.
Capitalism has one metric. One.
When I hear people talk about the "free market".or say that what this country needs is to be run more like a for-profit business, the first thing that occurs to me is that capitalism has one metric.
The immediate question is should government have only one metric? Also, should that metric be the same as a for-profit business?
The difference between a for-profit business and a not-for-profit business is not that the NFP doesn't make money. It's that NFP revenue is reinvested to serve a social purpose, while for-profit revenue is for the benefit of a small group of profiteers. It makes sense that a popular ideology that government should be run like a business results in oligarchy and immense resource disparity. When someone says that government should be "run like a business," this is what they are promoting.
The effect of capitalism on Democracy is to impose a single metric for success that benefits the elite at the expense of the rest of the population.
The effect of socialism on Democracy is to increase the number of metrics that define our goals.
Just like at work, I have a bottom-line metric, but I also have a metric for donor retention, number of people willing to volunteer, number of productive volunteers, number of people who share our messages, number of positive testimonials, and my organization has metrics like number of people served.
Socialism invites government to increase the variety of metrics that measure success. We want to increase our number of graduates; we want to decrease student debt,; increase the number of people with access to healthcare; decrease health care costs; increase the number of children who are well-nourished; decrease the number of citizens who waste in jail for non-violent crimes; increase good jobs; decrease dependency of fossil fuels, etc.
A fundamental divide seems to be between people who think it's appropriate for the government to be concerned with such metrics, and people who don't.
I know a lot of people do think that government has no business trying to move those metrics and they extol the virtues of privatization divorced from any kind of data.
This is where the line is drawn and where we pick a side.
I'm on the side that cares about more than one metric.
#FeelTheBern
Edit to add: I think I'm refining my argument for a Sanders vs. Trump general election.
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