Capitalism 5.0

At the center of the short-lived American Capitalism 5.0 model was the notion of shareholder value. Instead of being treated as social institutions chartered by government to carry out important functions in the economy, corporations were treated as the purely private property of shareholders. And in the absence of other measures to indicate the approval or disapproval of thousands or millions of mostly anonymous shareholders, stock and bond prices were treated as the measure of success or failure. Corporate executives who were compensated with stock options had a personal incentive to do whatever it took to crank up share prices. If that meant producing a superior product at a lower price while paying good wages to American workers, fine. If it meant transferring production to a foreign police state with low-wage labor while laying off the U.S. workforce, or breaking up the company and auctioning off its assets to the highest bidder, well, that was OK, too, if share prices went up.

-Michael Lind, "American capitalism 6.0: The search for a new model",
Salon, May 18^th, 2010

There's actually not much to add: I think it's a fairly nice summary of the history of American capitalism, an on-point (if not necessarily original) indictment of what's been wrong with the most recent phase of American capitalism, and the above paragraph (which I liked as a summary, though, again, not necessarily original) was too long too tweet. The article doesn't quite live up to its rhetorical subheader ("The form of capitalism the U.S. has pursued for three decades has been discredited. What's next?"--the answer would seem to be that Lind doesn't know, either), but it's worth a gander if you have a few minutes.

Well: one point I would add or emphasize or ask you to note if you read Lind's piece is that he's right about the early version of American capitalism being a mixed enterprise system, with the entrepreneurial capitalism some conservatives laud and the finance and managerial capitalism we're really more familiar with being historical epochs, and not necessarily enduring ones. The fact takes special significance in light of so many members of the, ahem, teabagger persuasion taking it for granted that capitalism, by which they probably mean 19^th Century entrepreneurial capitalism, is somehow inherently American or constitutionally decreed or was somehow on the minds of the Founding Fathers when it wouldn't actually be descriptive of the American economy until the Founders were dead or dying (of course, it's also hard to tell if the teabaggers mean anything, or know what they mean, given just how tenuous their grip on history actually is; something I've remarked on previously).