The system doesn’t need to be fixed – it needs to be changed completely.

Our health care system is vastly underprepared for this crisis, and government assistance has been far from adequate. The response to such atrocities is often to say that “the system is broken.”

But the problem isn’t a broken system – it’s that this is the way the system is designed to work. People are dying because a bottle of insulin that costs $6 to make (according to researchers) costs $320 to buy, but that’s not because the system isn’t working. It’s because the system is self improving to accomplish the only goal it has: to maximize profits.

When businesses burn down forests and dump chemicals into oceans, it’s not because the executives don’t believe in climate change. It’s because if they don’t work to maximize short-term profits, then they’ll be replaced by someone who will.

Bigotry is awful from a human perspective, but for capitalism it’s wonderful. It gives a scapegoat for the problems caused by the powerful elites of society. In order to divert the blame of economic problems away from the ones in power causing them, an effort is made to divert blame onto minority groups by blaming immigrants for stealing jobs, single mothers for using welfare, Jews for hoarding wealth, Chinese for COVID-19, etc.

The destruction of the world to make profits is irrational only from a human point of view. Capitalism doesn’t take humanity into account. Restructuring our system around public ownership is the way forward.

Anthony Fiori

Portland

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