WHEN TO TRADE IS TO TREAD ON THE SOUL OF MAN

Capitalism is ruining the world and communism is no solution. What is needed is humanism, capitalism with a human face, but that is not possible for the gluttonous capitalist will not allow that. Often it is said that capitalism is at fault and not the capitalist. But that is a flawed argument for lack of scruples in business cannot be condoned and that is an inseparable part of business, this collusion of the capitalist with the State, what is termed crony capitalism. What goes on in the name of legitimate profit-making is essentially profiteering and the moneyed man does not care about the consequences of his profit-making at the expense of the hapless common customer who is drained off his means of basic subsistence thereby and gradually sinks to the level of a debased destitute shorn of all that makes life worth living. To facilitate the luxury of a few the masses must suffer, what kind of legitimacy of profit-making is this and what kind of economics perpetrates this in the name of social development? Would the rich like to subscribe to such penury? Would they agree to accept such an abysmal standard of living that makes life worse that an honourable death? Would they love to have the luxury of seeing their dear ones perish to malnourishment, undernourishment, lack of health-care and education? Would they be happy to spend the rest of their lives in the slums where their sisters and brothers live, in the huts and the hovels where their countrymen are forced to live thanks to their exploitation? This drainage of wealth is not natural but man-made, this system of upward suction of the world's resources by the privileged an engineered one whereby the elite enjoy the fruits of the labour of the lost children of God while the latter languish in the mire of material misery thrust upon them by the protagonists of the new-age prosperity. The accumulation of capital at the top and the trickle-effect of money downwards is a brutal idea, its practice and actualization a barbarous one and is a grave insult to the dignity of the billions that labour to fill the coffers of the rich but remain in their 'purified poverty' for good to the delight of the donors and the do-gooders who may now 'legitimately' justify their coarse collection of copper and even feel the heightened ecstasy of saving the poor and the penniless from their perilous state by dishing out a dole or two by way of dubious donation. The water of the Ganga being fed into the Ganga, ah, what a charity the rich man doeth while all the while man sinks in the soggy sand of sub-normal living!