Enough of Asshole Capitalism

I recently read both Plastic, Inc. (Beth Gardiner) and These Are the Plunderers (Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner), and, boy, am I mad. Nothing in either book really came as a surprise, but the degree to which some people are willing to be greedy at the expense of others is still daunting. The latter introduced me to the phrase “Asshole Capitalism,” a phrase that comes from the work of Aaron James, a philosophy professor at University of California, Irvine. It can be summed up as a system where “citizens feel entitled to unlimited personal enrichment even at social cost.”

In other words, capitalism. No wonder a recent survey found that 43% of U.S, adults view socialism favorably (although Vice President J.D. Vance finds it a hard term to define and seems to think it has to do with foreign workers and transgender athletes).  

Plastic, Inc. tells the story of how, over the course of several decades, the petrochemical industry has worked to have us consume ever more plastic while not only absolving themselves of the responsibility for what happens to all that plastic but also boldly attempting to make consumers feel guilty about not doing a better job of recycling it. Those of us of a certain age might remember the “Crying Indian” littering ad. Well, that ad was sponsored and paid for by the industries that were producing the litter.

These Are the Plunderers shows how private equity firms blithely take companies and strip them of valuable assets, enriching themselves while often essentially destroying the companies. The authors focus much attention on healthcare, such as nursing homes or emergency room staffing, in which private equity ownership leads to demonstrably higher costs, job cuts, and worse care, while making boatloads of money for the private equity owners. Manufacturing, retailing, and other industries have also had victims.

Capitalism is replete with disregard for the common good. E.g., the fossil fuel industry giving us cheap gas without being responsibly for the ensuing climate change, mining companies that strip the earth while wrecking ecological damage on the environment, or manufacturers that pollute their local communities then close the factories when asked to clean up their waste. Capitalism has a very bad habit of not recognizing either costs imposed on others or costs to clean up their actions. It’s someone else’s problem, and that someone else usually ends up being those of us who pay taxes, or whose health is deemed unimportant.

Cancer alley is no secret, nor are the health risks of the fracking craze that has supercharged the profits of oil & gas companies. We’re becoming more aware of how pervasive microplastics are, and just starting to realize how bad that is for us.  

But, meanwhile, while rest of us suffer the consequences, a small number of people are getting ever richer.

And now, of course, we’re rushing into the AI boom, which proponents think will lead us into a new golden age but skeptics think may at most cost millions of jobs, a data center on every corner, and, just possibly, the end of humanity. Calls for more regulation have been met with the usual capitalism shibboleths – it would curtail innovation, it would just handicap us relative to our foreign competitors, and, anyway, it may be too late. The real reason, of course, is that there’s money to be made, damn the consequences. Asshole capitalism strikes again.

I, like many others, have called for some sort of AI tax, a mechanism to share those predicted huge gains more equally, rather than just ending up benefiting the select few. Elon has his trillion, and Jeff, Sam, Jensen, and even Dario, to name a few, are looking to join him. The rest of us are expected to be grateful for the scraps they throw us.

Mr. Musk is starting to feel a little guilty, or at least would like to give the appearance of a social conscience, by announcing on X: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.” Taken literally, that’d be worth about $10b, compared to SpaceX’s roughly $2 trillion valuation and his personal worth of about $1 trillion, so I guess he’s not feeling too guilty.

He might have been spurred by Anthropic’s announcement that it would contribute 5% of its shares to a new public service corporation, “with an additional 2% added at the board’s discretion for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a set baseline.” The announcement was vague about how the new entity would service the public, other than to say it “will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.”  

Credit: Maccus

It’s worth noting that University of Colorado law professor Ann Lipton told Theo Francis of The Wall Street Journal: “public shareholders will have very few governance rights,” so whatever benefits the rest of us might end up getting from it won’t, of course, be decided by us.   

Mr. Mush was dismissive, sniffing: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.”

Asshole capitalism is why the upper 1% account for a third of total net worth, why CEO pay is now 325 times as much as the typical worker’s, and why the middle class has been “hollowed out” over the past four decades. Thanks to Citizens United, it has allowed Mr. Musk and other plutocrats to heavily influence both our elections and our legislators.

Asshole capitalism is why billionaires don’t seem to pay much in taxes. It has kept the carried interest provisions of the tax code firmly in place, and allowed Meta to claim huge tax breaks intended for other purposes.

Our social benefit programs are at best fraying and at worst being systematically dismantled. Our public infrastructure – including public schools, roads, water systems, and public safety – are woefully underinvested. We have shamefully tolerated a persistent economic underclass, which more and more of us are at risk of falling into.

So, no, one share of Space X isn’t going to do it. Five percent of Anthropic stock into a public service corporation isn’t going to do it. Our society is going to be radically different in twenty years and probably unrecognizable by the end of the century. If we continue to let asshole capitalists decide, and benefit from those futures, then shame on us.    

I’d say shame on them, but they’ve already shown that they have no shame.