Morning musings: economics and social morals

[justben]

My mind was wandering on the way in to work this morning. It started with musing about the perception that capitalism is evil, often countered by the system's supporters with the claim that it enables people to pick their purchases based on their own moral decisions rather than integrating someone else's morality into the purchase decision. I think they're both right to a degree. The capitalist system itself is in a sense orthogonal to morality exactly as the capitalists describe, but its detractors are quite right that in modern America at least it seems to be abused pretty easily by people who place the accumulation of wealth above other moral values. It's quite arguable that the system actually *supports* such a value set. My mind wants to go other places now (ah, the joy of free association), but at the time it then went on to note that moral systems are community-centric, and this modern age has many forces -- from trivial intercommunity communication to jobs mandating long-distance commutes -- working against a traditional location-based sense of community. And so the result is predictable: some people arguing that morals and standards need to be global in order to manage intercommunity needs, the system resists (cuz *damn* that's hella overhead), and morality stagnates while people try to integrate the opposing forces.

Not sure where to go with that or what the solution is. Just recording the random mind-babble from the trek down GA-400.

(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: intercommunity -> anticommunist)