Chapter 6: The Biggest Product of Modern-Day Capitalism Is Scarcity and Inaccessibility

People talk about freedom. In the United States, which presents itself to its citizens and the world as a bastion of freedom and human rights, the Declaration of Independence proclaims our unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and the Constitution guarantees many more. Yet look at the reality.

Under the current socio-economic system, are we free to choose not to live by Capitalism, to not pay for our existence, even if we don’t take from anybody or ask for a hand-out? Are we? Try it sometime.

You aren't allowed to live or create your sustenance on private property, which includes land owned by Corporations and wealthy people who aren't using it for anything. It includes land owned by companies who plan to use it in ways that will destroy it and render it uninhabitable for generations. Such corporations will make vast amounts of money off of it by fracking, strip mining or cutting down every tree. All of the good soil will wash away in the first rain, ending up in the ocean where it will destroy delicate balances that sustain huge areas of coastal ocean. Corporations are allowed to do this if they own the land. Such land is off-limits for you or me if we wish to live on or cultivate it.

So if not on private land, how about living on public land? Try parking your RV or sleeping in your car on a public street, pitching a tent in a park, crashing in an unused room in a public building, on a public street, while maybe cultivating a little bit of vacant land. Really, try it sometime. See how long it takes for the cops to come and force you to leave. Some cities have even given the cops the power to confiscate your tent, bedding and/or vehicle just to make it even harder to do it. Look it up. Research it for yourself.

You can't set up residence in a National or State park. You can't even live in a boat and moor your line to a place on shore where you are not bothering anybody. You must pay a slip fee at a marina or else own the land where it is moored. There is no legal way to live almost anyplace in the United States and other countries following the same economic paradigm, without paying someone for the privilege of occupying space.

If you cannot occupy space, then how can you exercise your rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, or any of your Constitutional rights? Apparently these rights would appear to apply only to disembodied spirits. If you don’t have money, the economic system denies you the right to exist, even if you spend your days in service to your fellow human beings, even if you have an invention that could provide free energy to all, even if you are improving your surroundings in many ways. If on the other hand, you have wealth, then you have far more rights and freedoms than those guaranteed by the Constitution, even if you made your money in ways that devastated lives and the environment, causing immeasurable harm in the process.

So don't let anybody tell you the United States is a free country. It isn't. Not at all. Not as it is at this moment in history. It is Capitalism at the point of a gun. Literally.

Did you know that in much-slandered Communist Cuba most people own their homes outright, with no mortgage? A 1960 law made a place to live a right and turned tenants into owners after some years of reduced payments to the state (Peters 2014). Since 2011, homes may be bought and sold there, a change made under steady economic pressure, including a U.S. embargo maintained since the early 1960s. In the author's view, that is a step back from the original commitment rather than proof that it failed, and Capitalist pressures continue, steadily, to push Cuba toward the same paradigm. The U.S. Constitution must be planted in a fertile economic soil crafted with the nutrients of economy of, by and for the People if it is ever to thrive and embody government of, by and for the People and fulfill the promise of a free, democratic and empowered community for which it was intended to be a compass.

A logical question at this point is: how did almost all land come to be private property in the U.S.? It is an important question, because in a culture that considers ownership to be sacrosanct, to be “90 percent of the law,” then it is vital to understand the basis of the construct called “ownership,” especially of land.

This is not unique to the U.S., but its example is illustrative and typical of the histories of land ownership in most countries. The fact is that when the Europeans "discovered" the continent there were already an estimated 60 million people living in the Americas (Koch and colleagues, 2019), in many diverse cultures and nations, many of which had no concept of land ownership or any other Capitalist concepts.

Disease brought by Europeans killed most of the original population, often spreading ahead of the settlers themselves. War, massacre, enslavement and, in places such as 1850s California, state-funded campaigns of extermination did much of the rest (Madley, 2016), sometimes after the signing of treaties with no more intention of honoring them than Hitler had when he signed the Munich Agreement with Britain, France and Italy in 1938, or his non-aggression pact with Stalin in 1939. He broke the first within six months, and the second by invading the Soviet Union in 1941.

There were even occasions when blankets and clothing from smallpox wards were given to Native American nations as gifts of “good will”, in the hope of spreading the disease. The best-documented case, at Fort Pitt in 1763, was carried out by British officers during Pontiac’s War, before the United States existed, and historians find that such attempts were discussed more than once in eighteenth-century North America (Fenn, 2000).

Biological warfare itself is far older. Some of the recorded instances, from antiquity to the nineteenth century (Riedel, 2004), though it is not always possible to tell a deliberate attack from a natural epidemic:

• about 600 BCE: besiegers of Kirrha, in Greece, poisoned the city’s water supply with the toxic plant hellebore;
• 1155: Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s forces poisoned the wells of Tortona, in Italy, with human bodies;
• 1346: Mongol forces besieging Caffa, in Crimea, reportedly hurled the bodies of plague victims over the city walls (Wheelis, 2002);
• 1422: during the siege of Karlštejn castle, in Bohemia, the bodies of dead soldiers were catapulted into the castle;
• 1495: Spanish forces near Naples reportedly sold their French enemies wine mixed with the blood of leprosy patients;
• 1710: Russian troops besieging Reval (now Tallinn) catapulted the bodies of plague victims into the city;
• 1763: British officers at Fort Pitt gave Delaware envoys blankets from the smallpox hospital;
• 1797: Napoleon flooded the plains around Mantua, in Italy, to spread malaria;
• 1863: during the American Civil War, Confederate agents tried to send clothing from yellow fever and smallpox patients into Union territory, and armies on both sides polluted the water sources of their enemies.

Biological warfare, in other words, is not the invention of the regimes our history books usually cast as villains. The colonial order that the United States inherited and carried on used it too.

Europeans exterminated the vast herds of buffalo that were an inexhaustible food supply for thriving populations of Native nations. Don't think of them as tribes. Think of them as nations, with their own languages, cultures, laws, religions and everything that defines a nation and a people. To call them “tribes” has come to carry the subtle implication that they were somehow not of the same stature and respect-worthiness as nations. Some lacked technologies the Europeans brought, such as firearms and steel, against which they had at first no effective defence; in other respects, many were far ahead of the Europeans of the time, in self-government, in the standing of women, and in deep knowledge of their land. When two cultures meet, a gap in one kind of knowledge or technology is a reason to learn from each other, not a licence for one to exploit the other.

Several administrations in Washington, and state governments, planned, funded and carried out the removal and, in places, the extermination of those nations. The parallel with Nazi Germany is not a rhetorical flourish: Hitler and Nazi planners themselves held up America’s conquest of the West as a model for their own war of conquest in the East (Kakel, The American West and the Nazi East, 2011; Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, 2017).

The U.S. government gave out the conquered land in grants to Europeans when the blood of the rightful occupants was not yet dry upon the soil. This is fact. This is history. If you weren’t there when homesteading and land-grants were being given out, then that opportunity to inhabit stolen lands is gone, over. You missed out. Since then, anybody who wants to live someplace has to pay someone for the privilege.

Now every square foot of land in the United States is either private property, or public land, both of which are off-limits to anybody unless they pay a price determined by an owner.

How can we respect that? How are we supposed to believe this is the natural order of things? That this is an inviolable and unassailable pillar of a civilized society? We cannot! One might as well move into a house confiscated from Jews who were forcibly removed to the extermination camps the day before yesterday. If you didn’t know this history, then you are not to blame; but once you know the history, it is impossible to be at peace with it.

Thus we see that Capitalism produces scarcity of habitable spaces, enforces inaccessibility of the most basic necessity of life: a place to be. As seen in the chapter on Inflation, land prices in all Capitalist countries always rise over time, sharply out-pacing wage increases for all but very few. This translates into ongoing, relentless consolidation of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands: those of the new Feudal Lords of Capitalism. According to data in The Land Report, a magazine focusing on land ownership, from 2007 to 2017 the 100 largest landowners in the United States increased their holdings from 27,000,000 acres to 40,200,000 acres. The wealthiest 1% own 40% of U.S. non-home real estate. The top 10% together own 82%, which means the bottom 90% among them own only 18%. In 2017, the largest landowner in the United States, John Malone, owned 2,200,000 acres of land, more than the entire state of Delaware, in a country in which over half a million people are homeless. Between renters and people paying off mortgages, 76.34% of the people are paying every month to landlords and banks to keep the roofs over their heads. Eighty percent of residents of the United States live on 3% of the land. The resemblances to classical feudalism far exceed the differences.

What about other necessities of life? How does Capitalism produce scarcity?

One of the central principles in Capitalist paradigm is supply and demand.

For example, everybody needs water. So if I get control of the river way upstream and dam it, I can charge people the most I can squeeze out of them to release it to them. I have thereby created neither value, nor goods nor services. I have restricted access to a vital resource and hold it hostage for a price. If you don’t pay my price, then you do not have access to water. Period.

Heed this prediction: instead of stopping the pollution of our air, when one day it will be unfit to breathe, some company will find a way to purify it and charge for the privilege of breathing it. This has already occurred to a small degree in Tokyo, where there are “oxygen bars” and oxygen stations for a cost, due to the high level of pollution in that city. If we do not fundamentally change the operating paradigm, some corporation will find a way to gain legal ownership of the air. Imagine having to pay for air. The regime in power in the United States at the time of this writing would love that and most certainly sanctify, justify, condone and enforce it.

Proponents like to call Capitalism "free enterprise,” which looks like a good thing on paper, a guarantee of each person’s right to survive by conducting business without government control. Motivation for this originated in Colonial times, when British Corporations and the Crown used the Colonies as economic tools, much as large international mega-Corporations use developing countries as economic tools to this day. The result benefited and enriched the Crown and its Companies to the detriment of the Colonists. In practice at this point in history, Capitalism truly is not “free enterprise” to any meaningful degree.

The Mom & Pop corner store cannot compete with Walmart or Target, who can afford to under-price them until they go belly up. So Mom & Pop go out of business. No one helps them. Then Mom & Pop end up working at Walmart or Target and can no longer pay their mortgage, so they end up quite possibly renting a place from a company owned by the company that owns the company that owns Walmart or Target.

Even though there was no help for Mom & Pop when their business had a catastrophic year, when Walmart or Target is about to go out of business the government (regardless of which party is in power) takes billions of citizens’ tax dollars (Including from Mom & Pop who have meanwhile been laid off) to bail them out. In cases where the CEO is found to have caused the failure through incompetence or unethical practices, they are let go respectfully with a hundred million dollar bonus for doing something that would have gotten you or me fired and a prison sentence had we done something similar on a small scale.

There are many renewable, sustainable alternative energy and transportation technologies that have been known since the 1970's and earlier. Yet for decades these were held back from replacing current fossil-fuel dependent technologies, in large part because gargantuan international petroleum corporations worked hard to perpetuate dependence on fossil fuels: Exxon's own scientists accurately projected global warming from the late 1970s on, while the company's public statements cast doubt on the very science its researchers had confirmed (Supran, Rahmstorf and Oreskes, 2023). In a world where a growing population is dependent on fossil fuels, the handful of individuals who control the mega-corporations that control access to and availability of fossil fuels has power undreamed-of by the most powerful kings and queens of yore. They can, to a large degree, set any price they want with no repercussions.

As described earlier in this writing, the oil shortages of the 1970s followed the 1973 Arab oil embargo during the Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The embargo was itself a deliberate use of supply to move prices and achieve political ends, and oil companies' profits soared in both crises. The average U.S. price of a gallon of regular gasoline went from about $0.39 in 1973 to about $0.86 in 1979 and about $1.19 in 1980, and prices stayed far above their pre-1973 levels for years. Since then the oil companies have played all kinds of games with the price of petroleum and have gotten away with it because nobody sends in the Marines to their corporate offices or arrests their boards of directors to stand trial in the Hague for crimes against Humanity as they should. These corporations are more powerful than the governments of many sovereign countries.

The same is true of medicine in Capitalist countries. Pharmaceutical mega-corporations use patent laws, designed originally to protect individual inventors’ rights to the proceeds from their inventions, to control access to often life-saving medications, often pricing them so high that only the ultra wealthy can hope to afford them. There are no consequences and no limitations on this behavior because Capitalist countries are functionally Corporatocracies – governments of, by and for mega-corporations and the Capitalist feudal lords who control them.

The examples are legion and ubiquitous. The evidence is incontrovertible: the largest single product of Capitalist economies is shortage, inaccessibility. It is by its very nature a win-lose-lose-lose-lose-lose-lose paradigm. Every dollar paid in salary to an employee, makes the Corporation many dollars richer.