Categories of Capitalism

By Glen Wallace

In the movie Wall Street the character Gordon Gekko makes a famous speech before shareholders where he states "greed, for a lack of a better word, is good." I would counter that 'greed' is neither necessarily good nor bad. Greed, rather, is simply a motivational tool that can, if allowed, motivate people to make money by taking advantage of workers and the environment. But greed can also motivate someone who has lost their job to start a new small business that provides a needed good or service, along with perhaps some jobs to provide or manufacture the goods, to the community. Therefore the correct approach to greed and capitalism is a pragmatic one. Greed and capitalism should be seen as a powerful team of horses that needs to be directed to aid society, but if not guided would run wild trampling people everywhere. Herein lies the fundamental flaw of the free market capitalists: they seem to be in some kind of fantasy land where they only imagine how capitalism can be beneficial to society and assume that it then is always beneficial if allowed to roam freely unfettered by regulation or laws imposed by the government. First they don't recognize the fact that where the capitalistic business has benefited society, that business has been carefully directed to so by intelligent people with benevolent intent. Therefore, it is not capitalism itself that is acting like some intelligent machine or robot looking for ways to help humanity, it is people that are directing the machine properly. But if the robot of business is being run without regard to humanity by its operators, anyone in the way of that robot better scramble away or hope for luck that the robot randomly veers away from your direction. The only way that we can insure that the robot of business is directed in a manner benefiting the community is to have a powerful government oversight imposing regulations that mandate that the business robot or the team of greed horses are directed in a manner that will benefit the community and not trample it. How else can we insure that the human designers and operators of the capitalistic business are driving their machine with benevolent intent? The free market capitalists, however, never bother looking at the manifold examples that refute the belief that unfettered capitalism is so great for the whole world. The free marketeers would rather live in their lala land where every business is this nice mom and pop operation that pays all their employees great wages, never dumps any toxic sludge out the back door, provides a product or service that the community greatly needs and would be facing hardship if the business never existed in their community. This brings me to my theory of the three basic forms of capitalism: 1) Crony 2) Parasitic 3) Symbiotic. The free marketeers in the fantasy land of their own minds prefer to imagine that if it were only allowed to roam free, then all businesses would be operating under the third form of capitalism, symbiotic. The symbiotic form is one that exists much like the mom and pop business example I described above where there exists a mutual benefit between the owner of the business and community where that business exists. The parasitic form of capitalism is where someone finds a way to drain money off of the flow of currency without putting anything back from where the money was drained. The best example of the parasitic capitalist brings us back to the start of this essay: Gordon Gekko. In the movie he gives the example of a painting he bought for X amount of dollars and could turn around and sell it for a much greater Y amount of dollars today. He didn't do anything to the painting -- he didn't improve it in any way. That is the goal in parasitic capitalism -- to take out from the flow of currency more than you put in. Any example of 'flipping' is an excellent example of parasitic capitalism. The term flipping is often used in the sale of houses where someone buys a house and immediately turns around and sells it for a profit without doing any improvements to the house. If that is the definition, buying something and without improving it in any way, sells it for more than what was payed for it, then most all forms of stock market trading would be considered flipping. The only possible exception would be if someone in buying shares used that opportunity to use their stake in the corporation to influence the board of directors as to how the company is run. It is a little ironic that we come back to him since he's the one that said that greed is good. But in parasitic capitalism the only sense of 'good' exists for the parasite himself. Now it sounds like I'm painting a rather bad picture of parasitic capitalism, but I think just as with capitalism as a whole we should treat this subset of capitalism pragmatically as well. While due to its nature, it's hard to see how parasitism could be beneficial to the community at large, I do think there can be, like in the biological world of parasites, where the negative effect for the host is either insignificant or nonexistent. Perhaps, to a degree, I'm trying to defend myself since I have in the past and am currently trying to 'play the markets.' In so doing I'm trying to come up with some way to realize some capital gains, but I'll have to admit I don't see how what I'm doing in playing the markets, in itself, will benefit humanity. However, if I succeed, that will leave me with more time to write essays like this one with intent to benefit mankind and without regard to the commercial success it might have with whatever I write. Additionally, especially considering the very small amounts I have to play with, I'm lead to believe that I'm engaging in the neutral form of parasitic capitalism where there is little or no negative impact on the host of commerce. But like in nature where there can be parasites that are very harmful to the host, the same problem exists in the world of commerce. An example of malevolent parasitic capitalism exists in the movie Wall Street (and I suppose I should issue a **spoiler alert** for what follows for those who haven't seen the movie) where Gekko tries, after buying it, to break up and sell off in parts the fictional Blue Star Airlines. Along with the break up, all the jobs would be lost along with the all benefits of the airline to the community where it was based. Gekko was planning to sell the airline, in parts, simply because he thought he could suck off more capital gains that way than by running it as a symbiotic business. Of course there is very often a great deal of overlap in all the categories of capitalism when looking at real world examples of how businesses are run. A business may alternately by parasitic at times and symbiotic at others or some parts or divisions of the same business may each be engaging in the different categories. However, its hard to imagine that one particular business act could be simultaneously parasitic or symbiotic. It would seem that the two terms are mutually exclusive if were using them as the business equivalents of the same two categories in the biological field. That is, if the relationship between two or more entities is mutually beneficial then I don't think that in biology that it would be correct to call the relationship parasitical. Rather the relationship if mutually beneficial would necessarily be called symbiotic. While the free marketeers seem to be completely oblivious to the reality of capitalism often devolving into malevolent parasitism, they do, to their credit, recognize the harm to society of capitalism engaging in its third basic form: Cronyism.

Motivational Categories

By Glen Wallace

I'm thinking of modifying my motivation theory to having just two very general categorize of types of motivation; Social and Creative. In so doing the altruistic motive would be merged into as a subset of the Social motive.

The practice of engaging in computer games is a very popular activity that usually involves both of the basic categories. Even when a human is playing just against the computer I believe the social motive still comes into play. The human player ends up anthropomorphizing the artificially intelligent computer generated competitors. The human also brings imagination to play by imagining that there are real human spectators either watching the event on television or are in the stands viewing the event. And when the human does well against the computer generated components, in the mind of the human player, the same reward with the sense of having ones social status among both the competitors and spectators exists just as it would in the real world with real human competitors and spectators.

Why People Love to Work for No Money

If we are to abandon paying for work the question arises of what will motivate anyone to get anything done. Unfortunately, many subscribe to the jackass fallacy whereby people wont do anything unless they have a carrot in front to walk towards. Motivation is a complex subject that deserves careful study. But instead of examining the subject carefully, the entire modern western society is largely based on one simpletonic, poorly examined, poorly thought through belief that humans are required to have a paycheck to chase after in order to get anyone off their duff and do anything. It doesn't take too much examination to refute the 'humans are jackasses' premise. One only need look at the practice of engaging in hobbies to see that people engage in work and get things done, not only without being paid but usually the hobbiest ends up spending a great deal of money to make the work possible. Similar to the activity of hobbies is the activity of fitness and athletics. I'm a competitive distance runner and let me tell you it is a lot of work and I have never won any money and while it's conceivable that I could win a cash prize from a race, I'm certain I could never 'make a living' from competitive running. So why do I do it? What is the motive? Well this brings me to my theory that there are three basic primary motivators for any given activity and competitive running satisfies two of them; those being status and creative motives. The status motive pays heed to our very social nature and our tendency to frame ourselves in comparison with others. In any competitive activity whether it be athletic, business or academic the status motive clearly plays an important motivator role. But there is also the non-status social role of the camaraderie that one enjoys when sharing a hobby or athletic event or any other activity with others. Typically this social role of camaraderie becomes an strong motivator in the conventional work experience where co-workers become like a family and a worker looks forward to going to work just to be with that family. I believe camaraderie is an especially strong motivator in the military where every soldier in a unit feels a need to look out for their fellow soldier with the same zeal that they look out for themselves. I strongly suspect the military organization fully takes advantage of the social camaraderie motive to drive soldiers to work to lengths that they would never go to without that motive.

While the creative motive may seem to be an odd motivator for a competitive athletic activity, I'm using the term in a rather broad sense of involving any activity whereby work is mixed with the physical realm to create something that did not exist before the work was done. And I believe a 'something' that is created can include completion of a run. Additionally the planning of workouts and race strategy also involve creativity. Often times, creativity is the primary motive for hobbiests. Whether that hobby is gardening, painting, or wood working the spark of creativity is perhaps the strongest driver of the activity so that people will spend great amounts of money so they can experience the process of creating something. Therefore, in theory, an economic system could be set up whereby instead of paying people to do something that needs to get done, the only incentive necessary to attract employees would be to offer the tools and supplies for a worker to get the job done. And anyone with an interest in practicing that activity would flock to the job in order to experience the same creative rush that motivates hobbiests to engage in their activity. But status often also plays a role in motivating hobbiests as they compare each others projects. The third primary motivator is altruism - the desire to help others. Now one might say that those engaging in altruistic acts are doing it for selfish reasons - to make them self feel better or give them self a good feeling inside. That may be true, but that is true for the other two motivators that ultimately the fundamental motivator is coming from the felt state resulting from engaging in the given activity.

I think the role of parenthood employs all three motivators. I've even worked on jobs where co-worker moms have said that they consider coming to work a break from the job of motherhood. That just shows to what lengths people will go to do a difficult job that doesn't pay but instead costs a lot, such as motherhood, when the basic human motivators exist for a job -- and none of those motivators involves getting paid money to do the job.