By now it must be clear to all but the most blind that American capitalism has lost its legitimacy after three decades of extreme right wing political interpretation of what it means.
That interpretation,led by unregulated financial engineering, supply side economics and wall street manipulations has led to a collapse of massive proportions taking down many pillars of Wall Street.
In short, US capitalism,by forsaking the very people it needs to bolster its fortunes, has lost its legitimacy.
President Obama will now have a historic mandate to restore this lost legitimacy.Unlike the rightwing reactionaries, he can build this legitimacy by invoking Abraham Maslow’s thesis on the Hierarchy of needs driving every human being.
What Maslow proposed early in the last century was that we proceed from fulfilling the very basic human needs to the higher ones.For instance we need to have our physical needs like food,clothing,shelter,health fulfilled along with our need for security before we can venture further to seek fulfilment in love,approval,self esteem and self actualization.
This hierarchy of values tells us that the capitalist premise of opposing the very fundamentals of human needs is wrong if we want our people to become all that they can be in a capitalist society.
This means that American capitalism should not blindly oppose universal health care and universal higher education and instead actively promote those in a profit free system so that all citizens can become the kind of enterpreneurs American society needs.The best example of this can be found in India one of the world’s poorest societies.By treating its citizens as a resource and providing them with a higher education access in a meritocratic system, India has been able to lift itself up as the World’s premier Information Technology provider.
In the current context in America, capitalism can only survive if it is seen as the pathway through which all of our citizens can access health care and the minimum means of sustenance before they can become assets of the society.That is the challenge Barack Obama must address if we want to have economic freedom which is usually the precursor to political freedom.