Capital doesn’t care

I drove through downtown Scranton, PA recently, right past a rally against illegal immigration. (Let’s not call it an “anti-immigrant” rally.) About 100 people gathered in front of the Federal Building, by all accounts peaceful and well-behaved. (Hackles were raised when a small contingent of pro-immigrant activists from Pax Christi and the Peace Center came closer to the crowd, but no scuffles broke out.)

Most of the participants, I am sure, were sincerely concerned about the present immigration system and its effects on their lives. But I wonder how many of them have thought about the root causes of this problem, and how deeply. I wonder how many would be willing to take their protest to Wall Street or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to the people who ultimately profit from the labor of illegal immigrants, who have a strong interest in the status quo, and whose influence is one of the things preventing any meaningful reform. I don’t know whether they’d be willing to go that far.

It’s interesting, in fact, how many of the things that tick off certain social and/or populist conservatives are in fact direct byproducts of the “free market,” which they supposedly love as much as their economic conservative brethren.

“Degenerate” media content? Hey, people buy the stuff, right? Eminent domain abuses that threaten property rights but benefit big businesses? Well, when the market is allowed to overwhelm government, it’s no surprise that it will use the mechanisms of government to further its own ends. Materialism displacing spirituality and religion? That one speaks for itself.

What they have been unwilling to see is a simple point: Capital doesn’t care.

Capital doesn’t care about flags, or borders, or customs. It doesn’t care about faith, or morals, or responsibility. It doesn’t care about families, or communities, or jobs, or people’s health, or the quality of their lives. It just cares about making more capital.

Now if you’re an economic conservative or free-market libertarian, your response is, “Well, of course it doesn’t, silly, and it shouldn’t.” And you’d be correct, as far as that goes: capital is an abstraction. People are the ones who care. But the problem comes when, under the pressures of our system, we abrogate our moral obligations to care about each other and the effects of economic forces, and focus on trying to satisfy the insatiable desires of capital—because, after all, “business is business.” (The well-known term for this phenomenon is, of course, “selling one’s soul”—in fact, you may recall that we talked about that in this space just about a year ago.)

Michael Moore’s new film “SiCKO” addresses the effects of the profit motive on healthcare—another area where “capital doesn’t care.” It should provoke a very interesting discussion in our society regarding the proper balances between people and profits, economics and morality, the market and the regulatory system. I’m not a knee-jerk anti-capitalist myself, but I do think that when those balances are lost, the capitalist system rapidly becomes unsustainable. And those balances have, in fact, been lost.

Capital doesn’t care—so we have to, as individuals and as a society. If we don’t, it will eat us all alive.

(P.S. In the “Credit Where Credit Is Due” department: while I do think that most people in the anti-illegal-immigration movement are sincere, there are clearly some folks trying to get involved who have other, uglier agendas. So I want to acknowledge the unambiguous disclaimer that Voice of the People, the group that sponsored the Scranton rally, put on its website, distancing itself from any connection with white supremacists or other hate groups who are attempting to leverage this issue for their own ends. Now if we can just convince them that the pro-immigrant folks are not, in fact, trying to give the country away, we might start to have some useful discussions!)