CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

280 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
Europe and the United States, and was drawing upon her observations of
the western world. For her, to “make sacrifice of a portion of the happiness
of a few to the greater happiness of the rest,” as prescribed by Jeremy Bentham,
was sensible and consistent with policies advocated in other capitals.
I pressed on. “The idea of deliberately mandating that some people will
be kept behind while others are pushed forward is poor planning and
fraught with risk. You build development, build community, build nationhood
out of shared commitment, not disproportionate sacrifice.”
To no avail. She and her like-minded ministers and then successive governments
pursued their biased and flawed programs for growth and prosperity.
And today their country is one of the poorest, most corrupt, severely
divided, continuously violent, and politically shakiest on Earth, one of the
many countries that have adopted unproductive formulas and gone backwards
over the past quarter century.
Enormous inequalities blithely accepted, even promoted, cannot exist in
an intellectual vacuum. Rampant illegalities regularly perpetrated by businesspeople
and bankers cannot exist in an intellectual vacuum. Both must
be dependent on justifications that have settled into the substructure of capitalism
itself. I do not think it is possible to have millions of people around
the globe indulging in fraudulent transactions, oblivious to economic consequences,
without some process of validation affording comfort to these activities
and their outcomes. Something is saying to practitioners in the
free-market system all over the world, in rich and poor countries alike, that
this is okay, this is reality, this is the way the process works, this widely condoned
interplay of illegality and inequality.
How did our prevailing norms and values get to this point? Quite simply,
by badly perverting Adam Smith and conveniently embracing Jeremy
Bentham, which will illustrate the third position on the path imperiling
capitalism.
Reaching into the philosophical underpinnings of the free-market system
is a vital part of the story presented in this book. It is key—perhaps the
most important key—to understanding capitalism’s corrupting continuum.
Recall, this is a book about linkages among fundamentals. The linkages between
illegality and inequality do not present the whole picture. To try to
get to the larger picture, we have to ask why. Why do we find tolerable a
world in which 70 to 90 percent of global income accrues to 20 percent of
the population? Why are we largely indifferent to legal structures that sus-