Let me start bluntly, wading into deepest water directly: we pride ourselves to have emancipated from war in our western civilizations – from waging war, killing each other. But take a good hard look at how our economy, that is, capitalism works: by competition. We compete for resources, objects, money. That in turn means – not always, but often enough – deprive one another from material goods for your own gain of said goods. But every human being needs a material basis in order to survive. So instead of killing each other directly, we are competing, and thereby depriving each other of the means to live. How much then did we actually accomplish by western civilization? How much more civil exactly is war compared to competition for the sake of survival?
I am not a hippie nor a dreamer. I know that competition can be healthy and productive, like: who makes the best car, who produces the best television. In these cases, competition can be a driving factor, is a driving factor to better products.
But there is enough counter cases, where competition makes no sense – and more than that – is outright counterproductive for the majority of people, and thereby to democracy. By making no sense, I mean the cases when competition only serves a tiny group of people, and not the majority of people, say, the general public, which should be the case in a democracy. How much sense does it make that states and countries constantly are underbidding one another for the lowest tax companies have to pay? It only leads to absurd consequences, like: Amazon Europe is legally headquartered in Luxemburg, because there, they pay taxes that approximate zero, although their main business is not this particular country. Facebook Europe is headquartered in Northern Ireland, again, for tax reasons. Nobody but a small elite is profiting from this practices of competition: the shareholders of the corporation or company. The vast majority, the general public, of the countries companies like Amazon or Facebook make their business in, and drain their customers and workforce for money, does not see a cent of corporation tax.
The next best example is wage dumping. I need not repeat here, that companies place their factories in the countries with the lowest salaries for their workforce. It is a commonplace, but a grave one: again, nobody profits, but a small elite.
So where do we end up if we follow capitalism and competition as its cornerstone all the way, in all aspects? We form an oligarchy of absurdly rich people who own or invested in multinational corporations.
Russia is an example of a country, that in a way, clarifies the distinction between the obscenely rich and the ones struggling to survive. I think nobody would disagree that Russia is about as far away from a democracy than we are from the next solar system. Putin is constantly playing a game with western democracies and their institutions and alliances like the NATO or even the UN – trying to destabilize democracies in order to prove that his idea of what a state should be – a strong leader on top who directs and controls pretty much everything and everyone in almost all aspects of life. But at least, one might say, Russia does not pretend to be anything it is not: an oligarchy, where only a tiny elite owns the vast majority of the countries’ wealth, and an overwhelmingly large crowd of the rest of people who barely survive on the little they have or work very hard for. In Russia’s example, we also see the competition of two systems: authoritarianism vs. democracy. Authoritarian rulers are actively seeking to undermine democracies wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself, because they know that functioning democracies are a threat to their power: if people were actually free and free to make the rules themselves, a system like this must either be discredited or outright destroyed.
The United States is, for many reasons, leaning towards this direction. A small fraction of the super rich owns more than half of the countries’ wealth. But these people do not stop at being content with being much more richer than the rest. They do everything in their power to become even more rich, influential and powerful. All the while, they keep selling the fairytale of good competition to their underlings: work hard (i.e. harder than your colleagues), and you will be eventually rewarded. That this is a parody on reality, anyone with a low paying job can vouch for.
The craziness really spiraled out of control, ever since the Supreme Court lifted the barrier on how much one single entity, a person or a company, can donate to a political cause. Let it be a person running for a particular office, a political party, or a political or social movement; the very rich buy themselves into politics and the process of law-making, by donations to a cause or person, by lobbying for their interests. They are interested not only to keep the status quo the system runs in, but even further it in a way that serves their interests and financial gain even more. It used to be that an entity, person or company, was restricted to an exactly two thousand dollars on political donations. Ever since that limit was lifted, billions of dollars go into political campaigns, people running for public offices. Nobody becomes president of the US without millions or even billions in donations to support his or her election campaign. In turn, they are willing to turn their ears exclusively to their supporters, directly supporting legislation that benefits those supporters – something they have to do if they wish to get elected and re-elected. For other officials, mainly for senators, that are not limited to two terms, the situation is even worse: they rely on a handful of big spenders to their campaigns that keep them in office. Often enough, lobbyists literally draft the legislative text that is later supposed to passed through congress – and often enough the texts get accepted word for word. This is a practice that no democracy should ever allow – but in a country where becoming rich is baked into the heart and soul via the American Dream, money really is power; the more you spend on a person’s campaign, the more access and the more influence you can expect to be able to exert on that person.
There is a simple stop to this madness: reintroduce the limit of how much can be donated. But the US has moved itself in a political deadlock: the people in power did not get there without the financial help of donations, and in turn, are not willing to end unlimited donations, for the sake and will of those who supported them in the first place. The US democracy, thereby, would profit and stabilize with a lid on unrestricted donations. But the political will to do so has vanished: instead, the million-dollar-campaigns turn each election into an expensive spectacle, a race, an event with entertainment value in of itself, much like a casting show. In a domain, where rationality and personal integrity should dominate, a system of persona cult has evolved, via focusing the race to be elected into office not on issues, but on personalities. This in turn leads to completely unnecessary and avoidable polarization – since not contradicting issues, but contradicting personalities are elected into office. The quality number one a successful candidate needs to have is building his or her own brand – much like a showman – without any regard for political aptitude or wisdom. This is competition at its worst: two persons compete for the job of president of the US, and the competition is – just like in a casting show – focused on their personal traits, appearance, etc., rather than their political positioning towards real-life issues.