I’m in the mood today for a rant — a short rant — about American capitalism. OK, I know just what the conservatives would say to me here: hey, buddy, American capitalism has done you pretty well. Sure, you ain’t got a mansion and a huge trust fund carefully managed by a blue-blood investment house, but you’re still much better off than 99% of the other 6 billion people on the planet. You wanna take your chances instead on making a life in Burkina Faso or Tuvalu? Then good luck.

OK, my imaginary conservative would have a point. Even the losers in America are better off than the luckiest of people in most other places. But the price of all this wealth has been a rather cruel form of capitalism where the excesses have occasionally been mitigated by governmental intervention. But over the past 20 years or so, the capitalists have been pretty successful in beating back the interventionists, e.g. by eviscerating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and by deregulating the telecommunication, banking, transportation and energy sectors. (Not that there wasn’t need for change in those regulation schemes, which were set up about 80 years ago; but a lot of babies were thrown out with the bathwater in the way that deregulation played out, and we’re starting to see the effects, e.g. Enron, the California power crisis, airline bankruptcies, etc.).

Here’s an example of the cruelty of our system, right from my own back yard in northern New Jersey. About two years ago, there was a fire during the night in a dormitory at Seton Hall University in South Orange. Several students were killed, and others were burned and otherwise injured. The fire appears to have been started on some furniture, then jumped to other furniture and room furnishings. It turns out that in Europe, the strong fire safety laws would prohibit the sale and use in public areas of flammable furniture coverings, drapery and wall covering. Manufacturers clearly know how to make fire-retardant home furnishings, and have been doing so in Europe for many years.

However, here in the land of the free, industry lobbying groups have successfully resisted adoption of such laws by Congress and most of the state legislatures. Campaign contributions go a long way in keeping American furniture cheap and thus encouraging sales and profitability. Requiring fire protection would require American furniture-makers to invest some money in anti-fire manufacturing technology, or risk losing sales to the European manufactures who already make fire-retardant furniture. That would obviously diminish their profitability for a year or two. (PRACTICAL TIP: Ikea sells furniture that meets California and European fire standards; not surprisingly, Ikea is a European franchise).

I’m not saying that socialism is a better way, but we need to swing the pendulum back towards governmental protection of people. The capitalists made a lot of money in the 90’s, and will now get some icing on their cakes in the form of the new Bush tax cuts. Hopefully, they are sated now. It’s time for America to start giving something back to the other 99%.