Working To The Letter Of The Law Will Not Save Us

Free market capitalism will always work to the letter and never the spirit of any law.

That was a thought I had recently, but in light of recent events it’s really hit home. You see, the only law capitalism feels compelled to obey is the law of profit. Sure, when capitalists point to capitalism as the greatest of all systems, they refer to a sort of moral capitalism, a capitalism that believes in the tenets required to make capitalism work. That’s really not any different than Marxists pointing to how communism is the best of all possible systems provided human being act in moral ways. It’s trying to change people to fit a system rather than create a system that fits humanity.

The bottom line is that most capitalists are not moral creatures. They are guided by a desire for wealth. Not all of them, but some of them. Most of them actually, but for argument’s sake let’s just say some of them. It’s obvious to us whenever there is a crisis and people try to sell hand sanitizer or bottled water at exorbitant prices. At such times believers in the capitalist way of life scream that such people are evil, but they are only following the law of the market which is to sell at the greatest cost people are willing to pay. This is economics 101, the law of supply and demand, the central tenet of capitalism. That it enrages people who are so completely supportive of capitalism is evidence that most people’s convictions are not the result of a prolonged search for truth but rather a prolonged period of indoctrination. Most of us do not spend much time questioning the basic premises we’ve been told since youth.

Besides, that’s the alleged beauty of capitalism is that morality is not required. No matter how selfishly we are motivated by profit, the market will transform individual selfishness into a win/win for everyone. This is what they call the “magic” of the marketplace. Economics is the one (alleged) science that uses magic as a factor in its equations.

But even the most uneducated of the common people seem to know there’s no such thing as magic, at least when their personal finances are involved. They understand that morality needs to be a part of the equation. That’s why they get so angry at price-gougers, especially when they themselves are the ones being gouged. When they are charged $30 for 24 bottles of water, their sense of fairness suddenly comes to the fore, although they never seem to notice that they’ve been led to pay $1.25 for a bottle of water from a vending machine when a few decades back there used to be a free water fountain where the vending machine now stands. People must be sold capitalist ideas, and when the pleasant packaging and marketing are absent and they are left staring at the ugly face of economic exploitation, they rebel.

Which is why laws are written to protect ordinary people from the abuses of capitalism. Or were. It seems there are few if any new laws written nowadays to protect the average American from those who use the market without any morals. This is what is pushed by libertarians as the ideal form of capitalism, but even they have no love of immoral capitalists. So our government is compelled from time to time to pass laws restricting those who wish to make a profit by egregiously hurting individuals, animals, or the environment. Even capitalists have a certain revulsion to those who practice their religion to zealously.

The problem is, as I came to realize a short while ago, that capitalists will do everything in their power to follow the letter of the law while doing everything they can to avoid following the spirit of the law. No one person is to blame, it is just the nature of the beast. The most immoral of capitalists—which we’ve already admitted, such people do exist—will hire a team of lawyers to find weaknesses in the wording of any law in order to contest what the meaning of it really was meant to be. Their legal team, having much more financial incentive to argue their case, will eventually outlast those who argue on the side of principle over profit.

And once those greediest of capitalists—which for the sake of argument, we will agree are a small minority of those who engage in the practice of capitalism—are able to bend the laws to their own advantage, it now leaves those with high moral standards (a group to which the greater share of capitalists surely belong) to compete on unequal ground. Of those capitalists with high moral standards, there will undoubtedly be a few in exceptional circumstances who will have to capitulate to the new reality of competing in a market in which some are circumventing the spirit of the law. Perhaps they have an ill spouse, or have recently acquired debt, or have through no fault of their own fallen upon hard times. They are competing in an economic jungle in which they must either find a way to survive or else perish. When life and death are on the line, morality is understandably pushed to the side.

So it is that within the pool of capitalists—the vast majority of whom are pillars of the community who are motivated more by their concern for society than personal advancement—yet another segment is led away from the spirit of the law into accepting the need to conform merely to the letter of the law. At which point a certain amount of high-minded but not that high-minded capitalists are forced to abandon principles for profit or even survival. At which point most of those left realize they are involved in a game where, if they wish to play, morality will be a millstone around their necks.

It is at this point you will hear the capitalists say “Why should I follow rules when no one else is? If I do, I shall only perish. I’ll have to do whatever is necessary to survive.” I understand that way of thinking. Because, as I’ve said before, when survival is on the line, it’s hard to maintain your morality. Few do, and among those, much fewer survive.

I think of capitalism and the letter and spirit of the law now in light of the current pandemic and the resulting stock market crash. As a working class blue collar worker, I have a bit of a finger on the pulse of those who are now facing the fallout of a system that has for decades been built upon the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Nurses lack for masks, patients lack for testing, millions of us lack healthcare, workers lack sick leave, and the capitalist system lacks the ability to cope with a crisis that does not work within the law that has been shaped by the greed of a few and followed by the economic necessities of the rest. 

And all the laws that we had in place to prevent catastrophes such as the one we now face have been more or less followed to the letter. But not to the spirit. Because capitalism has no soul.

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