CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

340 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
And it is the conditions that sustain massive global inequality that must
change if capitalism is to succeed in spreading prosperity.
The Economist is certainly one of the world’s most respected publications,
and therefore I would hope to see a slight qualification to a point
made in a 2004 essay: “They are quite right, these champions of the world’s
poor, that poverty in an age of plenty is shameful and disgusting. But they
are quite wrong to suppose . . . that the rich enjoy their privileges at the expense
of the poor—that poverty, in other words, is inseparable from a system,
capitalism, that thrives on injustice.” 3 Poverty can obviously have its
own causes. But capitalism as it is practiced today can generate injustices.
That portion of poverty which arises from rank illegalities in which westerners
participate is indeed unjust, as I think the Economist would agree. And
from my analysis, that portion happens to amount to hundreds of billions of
dollars a year.
How can changes in pervasive illegalities and debilitating inequalities
occur when both outcomes are rationalized by capitalism’s distorted philosophical
underpinnings, the third part of the continuum threatening to the
system? Frankly, Adam Smith has been trashed, as we preserved only his
“invisible hand” to justify many other perversions of his moral philosophy
and much of his free-market thinking. Smith understood full well the character
of the people it would take to run his system properly, and he would
be terribly disappointed today to find that illegal pursuits and enormous
disparities have arisen from distortions of his ideas. We grabbed his free
markets and shunned his ethics and produced exactly the world he sought
to avoid.
Because coming along at about the same time was Jeremy Bentham with
much more agreeable ideas. Life is all about maximizing, and the interest of
the slow and unproductive can be sacrificed to the cumulative advantage of
the quick and efficient. After all, ends justify means. The goal of the greatest
good surmounts every objection.
Capitalism has embraced a strong utilitarian philosophy that is extraordinarily
self-serving. With utilitarianism by its side, capitalism can explain
away poverty and inequality and even anoint circumvention of the law
where necessary to meet self-conceived maximizing goals. On the altar of
justifying injustice, many outrages can be perpetrated.
Some readers may have initially been skeptical of the need to extend a
hard look at global capitalism into the realm of philosophy. I hope it is clear