Capitalism

I've been haunted by an image I saw on the BBC news yesterday. The report was on the drought and food shortages in northern Uganda. The cameras showed a mother feeding her children pieces of dried raw goat skin which they were chewing on because they were so hungry.

This is a f*$"ing disgrace.

How can we live in a such a divided, unequal world. My immediate reaction was that this kind of atrocity is the result of western capitalism. Certainly pure 'free market' capitalism is not serving the desperate needs of the bottom billion of this world. But are these anti-capitalist feelings justified?

Capitalism will be said to be the most effective way to lift people out of poverty through development from outside investment (although the bottom billion still struggle). I'm not sure about the socialist track record on international development?

What is a different vision? I don't know how to solve this (rarely mentioned) global crisis. However, I'm left feeling less inclined to sound neutral about Capitalism as the best of a bad bunch for the world (I still maintain that Christians motivated by love should be socialist). Capitalism may be the best of a bad bunch but that doesn't mean it's not negative. It's appalling that there is such inequality in the world. Unregulated Capitalism promotes this inequality (i.e. by the unlevel playing field of free market economics) and so it should be REGULATED for the negative system that it is.