October 15, 2009. Is buying and selling with common, pre-agreed prices the best kind of capitalism we can come up with? Hell no. It leads to many unhappy results compared to other ways of doing business. Combined with the traditional capitalist paradigms of "greed is good" and "maximize profit" and "success as a number of units of money," it gets even worse. Add pressure to generate short term money profits resulting from businesses selling future profits to the public (owners of stock / shareholders), and you get poor quality products produced that are rushed to market with new, heavily-marketed yet unnecessary features and an accelerated rate of old products causing landfill pollution. Some people may always make bad decisions with their money and become poor in that money system, but pre-set prices kick them when they are down and abuse them, making poverty much worse.
A step forward would be a business that works for voluntary payments from customers. Businesses are then encouraged to educate their customers about why they should pay and pay more for their products, causing open competition regarding business decisions such as being more environmentally-friendly and paying employees more. To meet profit goals, the business would necessarily maintain a relationship with their customers so they could prioritize repeat customers who paid more. They could then distribute additional products as available to customers who can only pay less or even nothing at all. Imagine a restaurant that prioritizes repeat reservations so that they can let customers decide how much to pay, getting enough voluntary payments so that even people with little or no money can eat during off-peak times. When you seek long term repeat business to maximize total value delivered rather than exploiting the maximum number of strangers to maximize short term gain, you get happier results for everyone. The questions non-greedy, caring business leaders should ask themselves (and share their answers with their employees) are simple: what is the best way to share your talents, skills and products with others? Are you "above" your workers? If so, how much more do you contribute? How much more of the rewards do you deserve and why? Do you keep secrets from each other about wage and salary information inside your company? If so, why? Besides selling the most possible to strangers in your country's money system, what other options do you have for managing distribution of your products or services so that you still get what you need to reward workers and suppliers and expand your business? |