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Capitalist system contains paradoxes

Kudos to Anthonie den Boef (Socialism cannot sustain wealth and prosperity, Letters, Aug. 2) for his astute chastising of the former Soviet Union’s state-planned economy but I’m left wondering about the wealth and prosperity to come within the capitalist alternative he commends.

To the Editor,

Kudos to Anthonie den Boef (Socialism cannot sustain wealth and prosperity, Letters, Aug. 2) for his astute chastising of the former Soviet Union’s state-planned economy but I’m left wondering about the wealth and prosperity to come within the capitalist alternative he commends.

What happens when the infrastructures for the population growth required to ensure consumption levels necessary for the all important return on investment have sufficiently transformed the agricultural lands we need to feed ourselves into the turf farms that harvest the soils that we might have instant lawns in the backyards we’re not allowed to farm?

Which raises another point: If our ability to feed ourselves with land that we own is a matter of privilege that a government can either bestow or withhold, are we really any more free in this investor-driven society than were the emancipated of the Soviet Union?

And what of our emancipation from a feudal past, but which still holds us, in law, a subject of the Queen?

Curious, no? These being but a few of the ‘paradoxes’ within the capitalists’ framework of freedom and sustainability.

David S. Dunaway

South Wellington