SUPERCAPITALISM

Super Capitalism

Introduction

Democracy has not spread to the same extent that capitalism throughout the world, and this has led to negative social consequences such as increased inequality and social insecurity. The market has become so efficient that it has neglected the human factor and now democracy is less responsive to common values. As the United States as a capitalist economy has strengthened in recent times, has also been weakened democratic nation. The citizens have lost ground as investors and consumers are becoming more powerful (Windsor, 2005, 100). The distinction between acceptable and unacceptable business behaviour is not a constant, but is shifting and subject to negotiation by a society's actors.20 Eric Hilt's in-depth analysis of the failure of Life and Fire Insurance of New York in 1826 makes Safley's point nicely. Hilt shows how defrauded investors and the courts struggled to make sense of what amounted to a gigantic Ponzi scheme carried out by the insiders of a company, operating in a fragile institutional framework of regulation and corporate governance. The failure of Life and Fire Insurance of New York was clearly linked to a financial crisis, and is an example of entrepreneurs constantly pushing the limits on doing business until they veered into illegal, even criminal, behaviour. (Tsuchiya, 2005, 123)

Arguments

Citing an economist at the time, Robert Reich reveals the relative convergence between corporate interests and national interest that characterizing this period: "the semi-monopolistic big companies can be converted into economic agents acting in the national interest. Corporations should not be broken but regulated in the public interest. “Thus, all being subject to the same rules, government regulations have tended to reduce competition among companies. It is also undeniable that the development of this predominantly industrial capitalism (called "democratic capitalism" by Reich) can be understood in reference to the phase of reconstruction after the war, but also the context of “Cold War and competition between "Western capitalist model" and "socialist model" embodied by the USSR. According to Reich, this event has been a powerful stimulus to engage the U.S. public investment in large scale in education and research, but also in infrastructure, aerospace and the armaments. A number of large U.S. companies have benefited from orders of the Department of Defence (Trinkus and Giacalone, 2005, 237). From 1945, workers in North America have demanded their due after the sacrifices made by them during WW2. The great strikes of the immediate post war period broke the resistance of large firms and thus led to an alliance between large oligopolies (big business) and the Big Labour (the big unions that organized so much of employee-American art). During this period, the standard of living of rose, their living and working soured and in 1945 the percentage of unionized workers in the United States established permanently at 40% of workforce. Based on a lifetime loyalty to the company, job security was becoming almost assured for most U.S. employees. Large industrial units were then no fear of losing competitiveness because they were all subject ...