Letter: Market failure

From Charmian Skelton

Brian Hicks believes that “there is no alternative to capitalism” and that “price and profit signals in a (relatively) free market” could help achieve sustainability (31 March, p 23). But the inefficient command economies – Soviet Russia, Cuba and so on – were or are part of the capitalist system.

In every country most people work for wages or salaries, and goods are traded for money, as commodities. As for the efficiency of capitalism’s “relatively free market”: the pharmaceutical industry has clearly failed to produce innovative new drugs to counter tuberculosis and other diseases of the poor, as shown by Angela Saini (31 March, p 20).

And Debora MacKenzie noted that “a key goal is to develop new antibiotics effective against TB. The pharmaceutical industry has long neglected the disease, as it has mainly affected the poor.” (24 March, p 44).

This is what will always happen when “price and profit signals” determine key decisions about research and investment. Price and profit signals respond to economic demand: not to our needs, only to our ability to pay.

We should never accept that “there is no alternative to capitalism”. Every problem suggests a solution: in this case, that would be a classless society, based on the common ownership of the land and other means of producing and distributing wealth, with production for use, not for profit. With that – you might call it socialism or communism – we could end poverty and also address the problem of sustainability.

Let’s face it: so far, capitalism has not made too much progress in this direction. Isn’t it high time we started to look for some alternative to this system which clearly fails people and the planet in so many ways?

Woking, Surrey, UK