Neo-Cheating for Conservative Capitalism

 Neo-Cheating for Conservative Capitalism

 

According to Marx, there is a contradiction within capitalism. To keep ahead, a capitalist must constantly reduce wages for the laborers, but also must constantly increase sales to the laborers. It's a public-goods dilemma: capitalists individually need poor workers, but collectively they need rich workers.

One faction of the capitalist class devised a scheme for their collective good: the welfare state, which supports the general public enough for them to afford to buy capitalist goods. It also buys public acquiescence to capitalist rule. But this scheme requires taxing the rich, which another faction objects to, on Randian hyper-individualist grounds.

Therefore Randian looter-capitalists are correct in calling welfare-state capitalists "collectivist". But the Randians are incorrect when they call themselves "conservative". It is the welfare-state capitalists who are truly conservative. The Randian looters are a radical insurgency; passionate, imprudent, destructive.

Welfare-state capitalists are conservative: their plan is continuous progress to a local maximum, the best of all sufficiently similar possible worlds. Randians are radicals; they dream of a discontinuous leap to Utopia, the best of all possible worlds. Sometimes such disruptors can jolt a nation out of a rut, but their claim to higher rationality is an illusion. Mostly their genius is in not getting caught. Any gains they make are mostly by chance.

Randian radical capitalists cheat overtly, but their conservative welfare-state rivals are more subtle. Welfare-state capitalism is a form of "Neo-Cheating". That's a gambling system, invented in the 1980's by Frank R Wallace. The idea of Neo-Cheating is to cheat at cards, but not for personal advantage; instead the Neo-Cheater cheats to move money from the strongest players to the weakest. Then the Neo-Cheater plays honestly with the weak players, and tends to win. In theory this is undetectable.

Likewise, the welfare-state capitalist cheats (in capitalist terms) by using State power to move money from the rich to the poor. The welfare-state capitalist then can deal honestly with the poor, yet still make a profit, because the poor are weak market players. Thus, by neo-cheating, a capitalist can loot without detectably looting.