Just how badly has American capitalism failed? Consider the following.

The White House backed out of a deal to manufacture ventilators because the price tag was too high. Go ahead and guess. Ready? It was…one billion dollars. Sound like a lot? Too much? For ventilators for…the entire country…in the middle of a pandemic…that’s already spiraling out of control?

Then think about this.

Jeff Bezos is worth $113 billion. Zuck, about $60 billion. Warren Buffett, about $70 billion. Are you seeing my point yet? Let me make it clearer. Either Bezos or Zuck or Buffett — or any number of penny-ante mega-billionaires — could pay for all the ventilators America needs right now, and not even blink. Not even think twice.

Take Bezos, for example. That one billion dollars to supply the country with ventilators is less than one percent of his net worth. The net worth of the average American household is about $100K. That’s like the average American spending…a thousand dollars. The net worth of the average millennial is about $10K. That’s like the average millennial spending…one hundred dollars.

That’s how trivial it is for a Bezos to literally supply the entire country with ventilators. It’s pocket money. To call it chump change would be an overstatement. He could do it and he’d literally never even notice the money was gone. It would take his accountant a lifetime to even begin to care.

Is your head spinning yet? What on earth? It should be.

All that, my friends, is an object lesson in the profound and surreal failure of capitalism. Let me now put it in simpler terms.

Capitalism is adding disaster to tragedy, by way of needless scarcity.

Suddenly, a society experiences a catastrophe — in this case, a pandemic. That would be bad enough. But because a tiny number of people in society have hoarded all the resources — in this case money, which really just means foregone ventilators — a society cannot respond to its catastrophe well at all. What happens next? What happens is what’s going to happen.

People are going to die. In fact, they already have. Perhaps you read about the poor kid who was turned away from an urgent care center for a lack of insurance. That’s not a ventilator, but it’s not exactly hard to see how a lack of ventilators is going to start killing Americans en masse very, very soon, if it hasn’t already.

Capitalism is adding disaster to tragedy…by way of needless scarcity.

How much is one billion dollars, anyways? The American economy is worth about $20 trillion. One billion is a vanishingly small fraction of that. How small, exactly? One twenty thousandth, or .00005%. It’s so small, I might have missed a decimal place there — and it doesn’t matter, because it’s that miniscule.

And yet the government can’t raise one twenty thousandth of the size of the economy in order to provide society with the one resource it needs most to survive a pandemic — ventilators.

Think about that math for a second. Really just think about it.

What would it say about you if you couldn’t raise one twenty thousandth of your income to, say, give your kids life saving medicine? That’s a flawed analogy, but I struggle for anything — anything at all — to express the magnitude of this failure well. I literally can’t think of anything remotely close to it, so let me simply try to express it again, even more concisely.

The government can’t raise one twenty thousandth of the whole economy’s income to pay for a critical resource during a pandemic — ventilators — while it would cost a Bezos maybe one hundred of his wealth to provide them for the whole country.

What on earth? My head is spinning. Is yours? It’s so grotesque, baffling, obscene, it’s literally impossible to process. How is it that in the richest society in human history, apparently — pennies can’t be found for ventilators? And yet it’s wealthiest man could single-handedly provide them, and never even notice?

Now, here’s the even more distressing part. Bezos (or Zuck, Buffett, etc) can’t spend all that money anyways. There is simply no way that you can spend a hundred billion dollars. What would you do? You could buy up all the luxury properties and mega yachts, and you’d barely have made a dent. You’d have to buy entire cities, nations, and whole social systems. Which is effectively what a Bezos has done. Americans don’t have ventilators because Bezos has hundreds of billions. Americans don’t have healthcare because billionaires have all the money in their society.

When I have more money than I can ever spend, then there is no real cost to me to supply you, say, with ventilators. Do you see how grotesque that paradox is? That is what “artifical scarcity” means. Jeff Bezos having a billion less wouldn’t actually cost him anything, because he can’t spend it anyways. All him having those billions does is cost everyone else life-saving resources, like ventilators in a lethal pandemic.

So let’s put this epic failure in more technical terms.

Capitalism has misallocated capital on a truly stunning and surreal scale in America. It’s created a system where an entire nation goes without the critical, life-saving resources they need, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic — while the wealthy could literally buy Americans those resources single-handedly, and doing so wouldn’t make a dent in their fortunes. But the wealthy can’t spend all that money to begin with. It’s literally just sitting there, going to no good use. Like, say, the critical one of ventilators. The result will obviously be needless death on a massive scale.

Economists call all that a “deadweight loss.” If American economists were actually good ones, they’d immediately understand that capitalism is a colossal and tragic failure. Consider the Soviet Union — Americans used to make fun of it for breadlines. But now Americans are the ones beset by artificial scarcities. What’s scarce in America? Yesterday — healthcare, retirement, decent work, education, good food, and so on. The basics.

Today? The critical, life-saving necessities. Ventilators, masks, protective equipment.

Capitalism — as an economy — literally cannot supply these things to society. It is more interested in billionaires hoarding as much wealth as possible — and then crafting political mechanisms to protect that wealth. And yet that wealth is too much, in the simple sense that nobody can even spend it.

But when I have too much money that I can never spend, of course you will go without — because the economy slowly grinds to a halt, as my money simply sits there idle, instead of being invested in the things you need. That is what “artificial scarcity” means: ventilators aren’t really scarce, we just can’t make them because only Jeff Bezos can afford them, since he’s now as rich as…a whole healthcare system, which Americans now go without, since those resources belong to him.

What we see at this dire stage of American capitalism is a kind of evolution, backwards, devolution. Yesterday, basics were in perpetual, artificial short supply — money, retirement, healthcare, etc. But you can eke out a life without basics, still. Just one without dignity and meaning and happiness. Yet today, the situation is much worse. Critical, life-saving resources are now artificially scarce. And you can’t live without those.

The result? People will die — needlessly, on a staggering scale.

I can’t think of an economic system failing in a more disastrous way than that. A truer way than that. You don’t have a ventilator that might save your, your kid’s, your partner’s life — meanwhile, the wealthy could buy them for all, for every single person in society…at literally no real cost to themselves. There is literally no better example of what Marx famously called “exploitation” than all that: you dying, during a pandemic because the super rich have such an absurd amount of resources in society that they could literally buy everyone life itself, and not even notice, yet won’t, because, well…why care? Americans are being exploited and abused by capitalism now not just into poverty and overwork and social disintegration — but into lethal illness and death itself. Yes, really — in hard, cold, absolute, unforgiving terms.

Let them eat ventilators? It puts Versailles to shame.

I have few word left to express how I feel about all this. But I am not the point. You are. Some day, the world hopes, Americans will understand just how badly capitalism has abused and exploited them. Because the world is made of good people, who want the best, still, even for Americans. The question is whether Americans want that for themselves.

Umair Haque

March 2020