Critique of Capitalism II

In my first critique of capitalism post I laid out my dislike of big business. Now I would like to address some of the aspects of capitalism (read American style capitalism) that I feel foster the creation of big business. The first issue regards the treatment of our national resources. It seems to me that capitalism does not have the proper respect for the natural environment. Capitalism values nature only insofar as it can be taken and made into something more productive. To my knowledge I can't think of anyone trying to value nature in and of itself (i.e. what is the value of having oil in the ground not for future use but rather just to have oil in the ground). If nature is not being "used" in some fashion to produce a product it has no value in capitalism. It seems this is a product of the pre-modern world, when Adam Smith developed the theory of capitalism it seemed rational to assume that nature and its resources were infinite, but now we know that our resources are not infinite and thus the raw resources need to be valued somehow, not for their future use but rather in their existence.

Second I feel that modern capitalism is almost zealous in its pursuit of efficiency. Efficiency is not an evil thing, in fact I would consider it a good thing, however it is not the greatest good and should take a back seat to decreasing the inequality gap among other things (i.e. the market economy should be set up in such a way as to help the fruits of society be spread around more individuals (or families maybe...) even if the rules decrease the maximum efficiency the market could achieve). I don't mean to be proscribing the perfect economic system that is not the topic of this post, nor do I actually have a clearly defined one in mind only that efficiency is not the greatest good in a rational economic system.

In the end my problems with capitalism stem out of lack of responsibility and the belief that bigger is always better and continuous growth is always good and the misuse of the market economy (and those who support that misuse in the government and elsewhere). This series isn't finished and I plan to continue to come back to this topic from time to time when I have new ideas and thoughts in this area.

(my thoughts on this point were formed by reading Reinventing the Bazaar by John McMillan and Third Ways by Allan Carlson and how they interestingly seemed to mesh)