How we make our money is equally, if not more, important than what we make it from. It can no longer be seen as admirable, or even 'good enough', to invest merely to earn a monetary return; the admirable investor must become someone who reaps monetary return from investing in goods and services which serve real needs. (One might think this would rule out investing in sin stocks, such as tobacco. However, since the legal production and sale of tobacco to adults serves the needs of nicotine addicts while returning taxes to government, and preventing the development of a black market in tobacco, one can morally invest in a tobacco company, but not in a company like Plutonic Power, which intends to carve roads and transmission lines through the British Columbia wilderness to make money by selling hydro-electric power to the Americans.)
Business people and other capitalists often assert that only the private sector creates wealth; by 'wealth' meaning a surplus or profits, the difference between costs and revenues. But this assertion is nonsense. First, the private sector creates nothing without the necessary government legislation, investments in essential infrastructure such as education, and services such as police and fire; and second, government enterprise can create as much monetary wealth as private, as its surplus is also the difference between its costs, and its revenues (taxes, fees, and royaltie)). At the same time, government investment creates real public wealth and human capital--a well-educated citizenry, flourishing arts and sciences, high quality medical care and the promotion of health, organic agriculture, public transportation, and public broadcasting, to name just a few of the basic elements of a civilized society which governments can provide, not only more efficiently, but also more effectively, than private enterprise, which really cares only for its balance sheet.
For example, investing in public transit systems which attract large riderships by providing a high degree of mobility and convenience, would in turn help to reduce air pollution, and traffic-related deaths, and injuries, thus generally increasing our health and well-being, and reducing our need to use expensive acute-care medical facilities. Similarly, government investments in small, locally-oriented, organic agriculture enterprises (including value-added activities), would help to reduce smog and greenhouse gases, as well as providing nutritious food, both of which, again, would increase health and well-being, and decrease reliance on medical care. These benefits do not accrue to private businesses because they do not have a sufficiently wide base of returns. Government, because it raises taxes and fees from many different sources, can benefit from revenue flows no private company, however large, can command. Furthermore, a large proportion of government expenditures eventually flows back to government in various taxes and fees.
Of course, it is the revenues from taxes that capitalists object to, since they view taxation solely as a burden, a diminution of profits, to be minimized for themselves as much as possible (preferring that individual citizens bear most of the burden, while corporations reap most of the benefits). Businesses tend to regard government investment and spending (much of which, in fact, goes for salaries and benefits, and for the purchase of goods and services from the private sector) as a nuisance, a burden, an endless imposition, as if the money vanishes like water down a drain. Of course, it does not. As previously discussed, government spending and investment circulate throughout the economy, supporting purchasing power, and thus a wide variety of economic activities, just as private sector spending and investment does. Taxes create pools, and government investments and expenditures create outflows. In the process, we get two bangs for our buck, the good or service itself--health care, public transit, wilderness--plus the attendant and consequent economic activity.
Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of the market, if it ever operated as theorized even in Adam Smith's day, cannot be relied on to deliver a sustainable society, or an economy that does not depend on endless growth to prosper. The market, in addition to serving private, not public, goals, only works properly for those who have sufficient funds to make the choices economists theorize that we make, and very often does not provide the paid work that is necessary to support the purchasing power on which the market depends. Only government has the scope and the resources to establish and maintain the indispensable elements of a civilized life and human-centred economy--education, health, mobility. Markets alone cannot serve the public good because marketeers have neither sufficient means nor sufficient interest in serving any other goals but their own.
Government is not our master, our parent, or our guardian; it is an instrument of our will; 'us' not 'them', and we should not allow capitalism's frequent and self-serving attacks on government to deter us from making government a better and better instrument for our public purposes by taking it, and the politics involved in its functioning, seriously enough to become engaged in them at all the various levels, and in all the various ways, open to any citizen who cares.
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