Capitalism, like any other economic and political system, is inherently flawed. This is simply due to the fact that we as a species are constantly improving, and no system currently in place is perfect. The issue that this article will discuss is the fact that in a majority capitalist society, everything is considered a market, and there are things that I believe should not be. Two that immediately come to mind are medicine and education; there are certainly more, but I have limited space.
The problem that I see when it comes to how medicine is produced and distributed now is that it rejects the initial purpose of medicine. The goal is to help sick people become healthy again.
With medical science being as advanced as it is, there are many diseases that were previously incurable but can now be at least helped with medication. For example, diabetes can now be treated with insulin. Another example is that deadly allergy attacks can be halted by an injection of epinephrine. The price of insulin rose from $40 to $130 on average between 2002 and 2013; two years ago, the price of EpiPens rose from $57 to $600.
This can only be explained by corporate greed and has caused nothing but struggle for those that need these medications to survive. This should not be legal for the sole reason that it can cause people to die for no reason other than monetary gain.
The issue that hits closer to home for those of us in college is the skyrocketing costs of higher education. It has reached the point that most people are unable to afford a bachelor’s degree without taking student loans from the government, which is indeed part of the issue. Universities realized that the government was willing to loan young adults obscene amounts of money for the sake of education, and so they began charging that amount. These loans are then expected to be paid off whenever the recipient enters the work force over a ten-year payment plan.
With stagnant wages and difficulty finding positions, however, this ten years is often extended to as much as twenty-five years. This means that during those ten to twenty-five years, this generation is unable to take on large financial burdens that its parents were able to, such as mortgages or children. This is the wrong way to do education, and has a dangerous trend towards making education impossible to achieve for poor families who will be unable to pay back the loans.
Normally I would end this editorial with a call to action for things that we can do in our daily lives to fix this issue, but I see none. I raise this issue more so for the sake of thinking about the fact that the world has not always worked this way, and it does not need to stay this way. Hopefully, one of you will be more innovative than me and find a solution; I would love to hear it. This topic is far broader than I was able to cover in this brief piece, and I will most likely be addressing it in more detail further into the semester.
