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‘The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism,’ by John C. Bogle: Mistrust Funds: “The founder of Vanguard lobs an attack at business as usual on Wall Street.”

(Via NYT > Books.)

If anyone gets to read it before me, let me know how it is.

I’ve heard more than one person say something along the lines of, “Communism is a nice theory on paper, but it won’t work in practice,” usually because it assumes that people won’t be bastards. It seems to me that capitalism has as much to worry about.

Increasingly there seems to be a lack of responsibility among today’s corporations. Not that there was ever a whole lot, mind you, but . . . somehow it seems like there was more once upon a time. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. How do we remind the people in charge of today’s largest companies that they represent corporate citizens. Citizens that need to pull their own weight, contribute to their community, and do more than treat their fellow “individual citizens” as a giant cash farm.

Capitalism works in at least some sense because it offers incentives and economic mobility to those who are willing to work hard and innovate. There is a problem, though, that when capital pools into a very small subset self-interest in maintaining the current structure can stymie further innovation. Capitalism inevitably leads to a successful few who either arrange a monopoly or collude together to strangle real competition.

So far we’ve luckily seen our system self-correct when this happens with antitrust legislation and the like. It’s a shame though that we can’t just depend on the people running our corporations to just not be bastards.

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justice, politics, economy, capitalism, Wall Street