If the mainstream media made the effort to analyze and report the facts, the whole country would know about a level of selfishness that has spiraled out of control since the economists of the Reagan era convinced the wealthiest Americans that greed is good for everyone.I take issue with the above introduction to this article. Selfishness has not "spiraled out of control" because of the Reagan administration. Selfishness has always been a prime motivation of capitalism which has in a variety of ways manifested selfishness throughout its 400 year old history. Think slavery, think wars of conquest, think child labor, think about the massacres of protesting working people by agents of the rich, think about the Opium Wars, think about how the CIA has been involved in the importation of illicit drugs into ghetto areas of the US, etc. Capitalists from Adam Smith to Margaret Thatcher have openly acknowledged that selfishness drives the system. In fact, they have made selfishness a virtue. They rationalized this asocial virtue by proclaiming that such a system will benefit everyone.
It is now being discussed more and more in liberal media because it is consuming the middle classes of Western countries. However, this was inevitable given the nature of the system: private ownership of socially produced wealth usually referred to as the "economy". In reality, it is the way capitalists have organized the economy which has naturally resulted in ever increasing concentrations of wealth and its concomitant power, and has produced all the present crises: islands of the rich amidst oceans of the poor, never-ending wars, and climate destabilization. It can only grow worse unless we, the Ninety-Nine Percent of the world, take action to insure our survival.
To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
