Apparently, even Mrs. Clinton's harshest critics are terrified by her "capitalism equals social Darwinism" logic. Nothing else can explain their abject silence when a direct rebuttal would have been so powerful. Instead of fighting for the moral high-ground in the healthcare debate, Mrs. Clinton's opponents always switch the subject and attack the proposal's technical deficiencies.
In slightly expanded form, her argument goes like this: To create a humane society, one that rises above the naked brutality of a Darwinian struggle for individual survival, anyone with the slightest jot of human compassion has no alternative but to insist that strong individuals be forced to share their bounty with the weak. History may have proved that Capitalism is more productive than Socialism, but without the state to redistribute Capitalism's cornucopia, market forces would soon annihilate society's weakest members. As much as one might like to unleash the market's productive forces, the inescapable unfairness of capitalism compels all decent, caring citizens to support massive state intervention.
By definition, those who accept this logic, and yet reject its conclusions, must admit to their own moral bankruptcy. They cannot possibly count themselves among society's "decent, caring" members. But what if Hillary Clinton's logic is flawed?
Bionomics argues that modern capitalism is indeed Darwinian, but it is Darwinism among organizations, not individuals. Every company in every market niche is locked in a perpetual struggle for financial survival. To attract the customers and revenues needed to sustain the organization, a company has no alternative but to continuously innovate -- cutting product costs while enhancing product performance. Companies that can't keep the pace, those that lag behind the herd in their industry, are ruthlessly culled out. But when a company dies, its individual employees do not. Like mobile economic cells, unemployed workers find jobs in other companies, other economic organisms.
Capitalism's staggering bounty, its endless proliferation of "new and improved" yet cheaper products and services, is the unavoidable by-product of this Darwinian struggle for business survival. Ironically, the ultimate beneficiaries of corporate Darwinism are individual human beings -- including the weakest among us. Instead of being crushed by competitive forces, they are lifted up and enriched by the consequences of the struggle for organizational survival. Wherever governments have allowed Darwinism among organizations to unfold, individuals enjoy more choices, more comforts, and longer lives.
Since unbridled Darwinism among business organizations has generated such spectacular benefits in so many sectors of the economy, why hasn't the same process of economic evolution worked its magic in America's healthcare industry? Because, at least until quite recently, competition among healthcare organizations was anything but Darwinian.
For the last thirty years, ever since private health insurers and Medicare/Medicaid became the dominant purchasers of health care services, the normal consumer-generated pressure for cost-cutting innovations was all but absent. Today, with 95% of all hospital charges and 80% of all doctor's fees paid by insurers or governments, few Americans actually care very much about the outrageous prices charged for many medical services.
Instead of having continually weeded out inefficient medical organizations over the last three decades, we now find ourselves saddled with an astonishingly oversized and bureaucratic health care industry. Though virtually every other American industry has gone through the downsizing ringer, we still have (and still pay for) twice as many hospital beds as we need. Though companies in other industries have discovered countless ways to slash administrative costs, paperwork still accounts for at least 25% of the nation's healthcare bill.
Had the normal rules of market capitalism been allowed to drive Darwinian innovation in the healthcare sector over the last thirty years, medical costs would easily be one-third lower than they are today. Access to inexpensive medical would be nearly universal.
Instead of recoiling from the charge that "capitalism equals social Darwinism", Hillary Clinton's opponents should welcome the attack and turn it to their advantage. By explaining the crucial distinction between Darwinism for companies and Darwinism for individuals, the big lie about Capitalism's immorality can finally be put to rest.