How Moral Is Capitalism?

"Capitalism's "core beliefs" are left up to the market."

And "the market" consists of each individual involved, with their judgments being made by personal interpretation. Inasmuch, there are no set of core beliefs in capitalism. Certainly, there is success and failure based on, as you say, giving the customer acceptable value for a service/product. But value is not a finite thing. I think its ridiculous to spend $4,000 for a Super Bowl football ticket. But, obviously, many other Americans wouldn't agree.

Capitalism as we know it probably could not have developed without a JudeoChristian base and the capitalism of the rest of the world is either informed by their Christian minorities or are attempting to copy the folkways of the world's Christian-derived businessmen.

The Medieval Jews in Europe, not allowed to own land and having their Mosaically derived ability to trust each other to do pretty much what they agreed to do, invented letters of credit and exchanged bills of lading at appropriate discounts for the risks of shipping, etc. The Christians on the Northeastern European coast learned to do it, too, and had that expectation of performance that came from their religion. Christianity overcame tribalism and Judaic practice, while largely tribal in itself, was spread throughout the Western World by the Diaspora.

In Asia the expectation, in dealings between men was that each will lie to the other and one cannot be expected to keep his word to one outside of the family or clan. The most extreme development of this attitude is among Arabs and Arabized populations. Long range trading remained within trading families and never developed very far until the advent of the Judeao-Christian traders and the necessity to compete with them. Most large-scale movement of goods was between royal courts or the result of raiding and conquest. Even now Chinese companies are, in China, mostly of the family type in that the large ones are government(artificial family) operations and exceedingly corrupt. The great Overseas Chinese Corporations have, until quite recently, been strictly family operations. The first attempts to enter the Western market by hiring foreign executives failed because the family members could not bring themselves to trust the outsiders and the outsiders knew well that they were not trusted.

There is and always been double dealing and villainy among the business class and there are atheists and others but the cultural norm is honesty and the developed free market is such that such dishonesty rapidly removes the villains from the marketplace. Their companies fail because cheating is ultimately inefficient and cannot continue longterm without government protection but that is an outside problem, not part of Judeo-Christian capitalism.

Socialism is also capitalism. Capitalism is merely the organization of surplus value, i.e. capital, for the production of more goods and more surplus value. Freemarketers do it by free trade which is far the most efficient method. Socialists do it by central allocation of surplus value- investment, which is terribly inefficient and must fail if there is no functioning freemarket system to borrow economic signals from. With that outside scale to measure against it will still fail but more slowly because while socialism is a theory of capitalism it is a false theory, like decreeing that the world is the center of the cosmos and flat because that is more convenient to the theorists.

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