Critical Western Theory

Critical Western Theory: Critical Commentary

Ever since I was a child the word capitalism has a relationship with me. Since my family is into business I supposed that capitalism has something to do with trade. And when I grew up I eventually learned what capitalism means literally. Well to sum it up capitalism is “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by state.” And as we all know countries such as the United States, Canada, South Korea, Japan. From these examples we can see that since we’re talking about capitalism it means that private corporations are involved in the development of the nation and you can see here in my examples that these countries have private companies that are considered as one of the top companies in the world and examples of this are Microsoft, Apple and Ford from the United States, Blackberry in Canada, Samsung and Hyundai in South Korea and Toyota, Nissan and Sony in Japan. These are all big companies that help their respective nation to grow.

There is an assumption that capitalism would encourage growth rates and better competition for private corporations as described by the father of capitalism, Adam Smith there is a system “invisible hands” wherein the government would not intervene in the affairs of the market. When I learned about this I quickly thought of a parents interaction with their child. On capitalism, the parents would let their children be, they would let them experience everything from failure to success because they think that experience is the best teacher and it would make them more independent while on other systems the parents would be strict and would lessen failure for the children but would also probably lessen the experiences that would yield growth. That was the allusion that came into my mind when I’ve heard of the invisible hands from Adam Smith.

However there is a question whether capitalism is truly good or not, first and foremost I believe that there is no such thing as perfect capitalism due to the fact that large conglomeration would be able to rule the nation itself. So of course there should still be power from above but I believe that the capitalism that we see now is more of a mixed capitalism wherein the states have power but choose not to in order to provide stricter competition between corporations which would yield to better growth for the corporation and the nation itself. I truly believe that capitalism can be a source of evil and exploitation but it is the same with bureaucracy wherein the exploitation would be in the form of corrupt officials. While there is this statement that makes capitalism bad in the form of “the rich gets richer while the poor gets poorer”. Since it can be manifested by the rich exploiting the poor, but as I’ve said a while ago in a bureaucratic system that is also what is happening only the one’s getting richer are the one’s that are politically rich (civil servants). So in my opinion it is a matter of balance between the two, while the objective of capitalism is to increase productivity so that there would be an increase in growth, it would also mean giving the private corporation power, while bureaucracy gives power to certain people and that would make them prone to exploit and to become corrupt. I choose capitalism still however as I’ve said there should be balance between the control that is given to private corporations, they can do what they want but the government has also the right to exercise their right to their power.