5 Terrible Flaws of American Capitalism Run Amuck

Saying capitalism is better than socialism is like saying “water is wet” or the “sun is hot.” It is that obvious. It’s that definitive. Yes, some people would disagree with that statement, but they are just as wrong as someone who thinks the moon is made out of cheese or that the Illuminati runs the world.

Yet, that begs a question: If capitalism is so obviously superior to socialism, then why are there still so many people that yearn for socialism?

There are a number of answers to that question.

Socialism makes a lot of empty promises that sound good to people who are lazy, incompetent, or not very ambitious. On the other hand, capitalism doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a competitive endeavor where people like that aren’t going to be rewarded. Capitalism promises to pay people what they’re worth, but what if you don’t believe you’re worth very much or you’re upset by the idea that someone running DEI struggle sessions is worth less than the CEO of General Motors? What if you place an extraordinarily high level of value on being told what to do and no value on choosing your own path? This could be a whole column (or book) and heck, at some point, it may be worth writing.

However, it’s also worth noting that although capitalism is undeniably better than socialism, given time, it can still go off the rails a bit. In America, it has done so, and yet, you hear very little talk about these issues because the Right seldom has anything negative to say about capitalism while the Left’s critiques of capitalism tend to come from a socialistic viewpoint.

So, you probably won’t see anything like this anywhere else, but it’s worth discussing some of the problems with modern capitalism from a conservative, pro-capitalistic viewpoint.

1) The corruption of money: If you look at Big Pharma, for example, one of the things you will notice is that they have used the staggering level of profits they make to corrupt everything adjacent to them.

They fund scientific experiments that are run by scientists that are financially beholden to them. Then those studies are published in medical journals that rely on them to make big buys. Doctors then read those medical journals, make decisions based on them, and take gifts from big Pharma to prescribe their drugs. Supposedly “independent” medical groups take large donations from Big Pharma and turn into shills for the industry. Add to that a media that is reliant on ad revenue from Big Pharma defending all this and then the FDA (which often employs people from Big Pharma before and after they work there) that rules on whether what Big Pharma is doing is legal.

The whole system, from top-to-bottom, is heavily influenced by money from Big Pharma. So, who’s looking out for the good of the American people? In a very real sense, NO ONE, other than a relatively small group of reporters, influencers, and doctors, some of whom are kooks that are used to smear all the rest.

Big Pharma is the worst example of this (with the companies that profit off of the idea of manmade global warming close behind), but they’re far from the only examples of it and if your first concern is what’s good for regular people, it’s a big problem.

2) Being co-opted by government: As certain areas of our economy have become more concentrated because of the success of certain corporations; our government has realized that they can work with private companies to achieve things they’re legally or ethically blocked from doing.

Can the government censor you? Not per se, but if they can get you deplatformed across social media companies, they can nearly do the same thing. If the government can work with banks to get them to refuse to loan money to crypto, AI companies, or gun companies, they can hurt or control whole industries. If a powerful corporation like Black Rock can be convinced and/or intimidated into pushing ESG, they can influence big companies across the nation to toe the liberal line to stay on their good side.

This is not a unique problem for capitalism, but it is a real problem and we’ve been very fortunate to have the Trump administration pushing back against it.

3) Income inequality: As the world has become more connected via computers, shipping containers, faster travel, and improved communications, it has allowed some people to amass absolutely staggering fortunes. There’s nothing morally wrong with this per se. If you can sell your product, software, or service in 50 countries at once, it’s understandable that you would make an astronomical amount of money by providing something of value to so many of your fellow humans.

The problem is that it runs afoul of human nature, which envies and resents anyone who does so much better than their fellow man. That problem is exacerbated when wealth concentrates to such an extent somewhere like Manhattan or San Francisco, that the wealthiest people live in luxury while the people who serve them their food, their coffee and take care of their yards may only be able to afford somewhere to live that is an hour or two away.

Eventually, when the poor and middle class struggle enough, that income inequality leads to social strife. This can be a tough problem to fix because again, these wealthy people often fairly earn their money and if you tax them too heavily, the result may be a major economic slowdown that hurts the poor and middle class. However, the flip side is that at a certain point, if things become too imbalanced, it can help destabilize a society.

4) Out-of-control consumerism: The sheer number of businesses in America and the proliferation of advertising has led to a world where the average American supposedly sees 4,000-10,000 ads per day. Billboards, media ads, pop-ups, product placements, podcasters reading messages from their sponsors, ads on t-shirts, ads interspersed into the social media posts you see, people posting things on social media because they’ve been paid – it’s endless. This advertising has a huge impact.

Although the estimates vary a bit, you’ve probably heard someone say that roughly 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. What’s the real root cause of that? It’s that famous line from Fight Club:

So many people have bought into the idea that they have to have Starbucks, the newest iPhone, IKEA furniture, and a new car or people are going to think they’re “not cool.” It’s not a surprise that people believe that when they see some kind of advertisement that usually promotes the concept thousands of times every day.

Over the course of a lifetime, as a result of this, so many people end up on an endless consumerist treadmill that never gets them anywhere, never makes them happy, and never allows them to accumulate enough money to feel financially secure.

5) Putting profit ahead of ethics: As companies have become increasingly pressured to provide higher returns quarter after quarter for the stock market, it has led to ethical compromises on a titanic scale.

Even setting aside companies whose whole business model is arguably immoral like McDonald’s, Philip Morris International, or the Hershey Trust Company, there are a lot of decisions being made to increase profit at the expense of doing the right thing.

For example, food companies regularly use dubiously safe chemicals in our food that aren’t allowed in other countries instead of much safer alternatives purely because it means more profit. In Sharyl Attkisson’s book, Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails, she notes that Big Pharma is one of the biggest sponsors of the trans movement, which they coincidentally make large amounts of money on:

There’s an even bigger medical money interest surrounding the trans movement that I haven’t seen discussed very much. It involves a sad reality: the transgender HIV epidemic. A CDC survey of seven major US cities—Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle—finds that 42.2 percent of transgender people who are men living life as women are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The rate is even higher among transgender blacks: most of them—61.9 percent—are HIV-positive. And the HIV rates are even higher among transgender prostitutes. That adds up to a fantastically lucrative market for the makers of HIV medicine, like Gilead Sciences. Gilead has developed eleven HIV medications now on the market earning over $1.5 billion a month. Pulling the thread further, I learn that Gilead happens to be the single biggest known funder of trans activist groups, providing $6.1 million in 2017 and 2018. Like AbbVie, Gilead is also listed as a “Silver Tier” supporter of The Trevor Project in 2020. And on the project’s website in February 2024, Gilead is listed as a $250,000–$500,000 supporter. Gilead says its goal is to “support communities that are disproportionally impacted by diseases aligned with our therapeutic areas of focus.”

Think about the implications of Gilead Sciences supporting a particular type of mental illness because it’s more likely to lead to people getting AIDS. How many kids are depressed because of social media companies today? How many fast-food chains endlessly scheme about how to get fat people to eat their unhealthy food, which will inevitably lead to them dying earlier than they would have otherwise?

There’s an awful lot of unambiguously unethical behavior that has been embraced by corporate America as standard operating procedure and more people should be speaking out about it.

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