NGEC 3:

Does Capitalism Does More Harm Than Good?

Through the years, we have seen the massive improvement and changes of
the world we are currently living in. These changes are brought by wide spectrum of
social and cultural norms that affects how the world resides today. The fact that,
these improvements gave the people easier life as it was used to before, however,
we cannot deny that there are also negative impacts that these changes brought to
us. Capitalism has become part of our lives even in the past, basically, it is the one
that brought various development through global trade. As we know, capitalism is the
principle of individual rights to the production and exchange of goods and services.
In economic perspective, it is the system that completely separates the economy and
the state, under this structure, every individual is free to produce, consume, and
trade economic goods according to their own free will. The government plays only as
a providing system of objective laws that protects the property and contract. But, why
does modern capitalism are quite a debate today?
According to Neil McCarthy (2020), a study of Edelman Company for its
annual Trust Barometer about capitalism, about 56% of its respondents were agreed
that capitalism is doing harm more than good in its current form. It seems that today,
people were more conscious about the possible effect of capitalism on the following
years. Since, there are quite some significant effects that the capitalism has brought
to our planet, people become wary or disrupted about its effect on the people and for
the planet. Wealth-inequality is one of capitalism’s drawback that causing only the
richest in the society are getting rich, the same society are not getting the same
progress therefore left behind. Moreover, due to wealth-inequality, greed is born out
of this to attain great amount of monetary gain. Additionally, capitalism also
encourages mass consumption, since raw materials are needed, the environment is
much more affected on this. This is a serious drawback of capitalism not only that it
degrades the environment but more importantly, it slowly killing the planet. These
things opened the eyes of many on how capitalism slowly deteriorates the world we
live in today.
On the bright side, capitalism brought many wonders in our planet, it is a
system wherein free market inspires innovation because people have incentives to
work harder, this leads to higher productivity. In reality, innovation allows the
societies to develop rapidly and give people a better quality of life. Moreover,
capitalism promotes individual freedom by providing choices, the right to own private
property, and allowing people to set the price of goods. It just not only promotes
political freedom by limiting the power of the government, but also, promotes equal
opportunity by rewarding hard work and innovation.
In this new era, we cannot deny the fact that every economic system has its
own downside, maybe we can just flourish and address what might seem bad to the
people and to the environment. The fact people nowadays see capitalism as
ineffective and unstable. However, capitalism also has many positive sides. It
ensures efficiency because it is self-regulated through competition and it most
importantly, it promotes innovation, freedom, and opportunity. Capitalism also meets
the needs of the people and is beneficial to societies as a whole. And even today,
Capitalism has led to a massive increase in new technologies over the past decades
and centuries. These technologies improve the lives of every people and also
improves the productivity which led to safer, more interesting, and better paid jobs. It
helped many countries to rise from poverty from equal competition between the
global market.