Boy, am I glad we have some constraints on capitalism! As an economic system capitalism is all well and good, don’t get me wrong. It certainly seems to me there’s a lot of people who wouldn’t even get out of bed in the morning if it weren’t for the prospect of getting paid by some running dog of capitalist imperialism or another, and it would be a shame to go to the office and miss their smiling faces day after day. But like an overpowered muscle car, you definitely want to be sure you can control it before you crank it up and see what it can do.

The hope of making a profit spurs people on to innovate and create. This is why no great books ever came out of the Soviet Union, for example, and why musicians and artists are invariably wealthy. And who can forget the vast estates, yachts, and extravagant lifestyle of Nikola Tesla? But there have to be some limits. Innovators are all well and good, but we have to make sure the system is controlled and redistributive measures are in place to keep bankers and insurance company executives (and their poor families) from starving.

Although actually, when you come right down to it, why do we want to encourage innovation, anyway? It seems to me the whole history of innovation since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been one of putting people out of work. Let’s face it, innovators aren’t job creators, they’re job destroyers. For example, did you know that it took 6 times as many workers to harvest a given acreage of wheat before the invention of the combine as it did afterwards? Whenever you hear someone touting a new development as increasing personal productivity, think to yourself, there’s another 5 guys who used to have a job who are now scratching their heads and wondering what they did wrong. They can’t all drive the combine. There’s no room, for one thing. Just one seat.

But I digress, this is about constraints on capitalism, not on innovation. If constraining capitalism happens to constrain the kind of innovation that makes perfectly decent people redundant, well, that’s just a happy side effect.

The main constraint on capitalism that I love is government regulation. Left to its own devices, capitalism will go out and do whatever maximizes profit. Let me repeat that with emphasis: It will do whatever maximizes profit. For example, selling people highly addictive yet carcinogenic products, baby formula stretched with melamine, cars that are unsafe at any speed, and pyramid investment schemes. Now, all of these might be counted on to limit themselves through the power of the invisible hand, but only after huge numbers die of horrible cancers, babies are poisoned, cars blow up, and people lose their life’s savings.

Government regulation means that capitalism’s get-rich-quick schemes are constrained by a force that’s fair, one where everyone in the system has equal say regardless of their value to the capitalistic system itself–in other words, an external force that can’t get swept up in the heady rush of turning a profit and forget to think about whether it really ought to be doing this. After all, one thing that capitalism simply can’t buy is votes.

Oh, wait.