Democratic political framework and market economy have been deemed as the core of a capitalist system, while fairness is the cornerstone for both democratic politics and market economy. Democracy stands against the dictatorship of very few over the majority and demands the reflection of the voices and interests of the majority on important issues including election of leaders of the community; accordingly, fairness would be the fundamental principle for democracy since fairness is the utmost concern for anything involving a multitude of people. Fairness is even more critical for market economy. Not only would the fair pricing and fair respect of the wills to do transactions be essential for market economy, but also would the environment of fair competition be substantial for any market based economy.

This ultimate importance of fairness for capitalism actually has created some confusion between the ideal principle and the social reality and thus so much often we might hear someone claim that fairness is the fundamental characteristic of capitalism. As a matter of fact, while capitalism as a social logic demands fairness in everyday life, it also is an immense source of unfairness for people living within a capitalist society. A better understanding of the paradoxical nature of capitalism in terms of fairness would help us to better deal with many crises we are facing today around the world.

1.      Capitalism as a result of fairness demand

An ideal capitalist society offers a game which is nominally fair to everyone in the sense that every person in principle could play any role in this game[1]. Obviously, this game would be very big in its size since it involves everyone in the society, and thus it would require a clear common rule of game that would sound fair to all (or most significant) players, which would be the constitution of each country. One of the essential roles of the whole legal system of any country that is constructed on top of a constitution is to guarantee a fair play of this capitalist game. This clear awareness and demand of systematic fairness would function as a driving force behind the social evolution in capitalist systems, which would differentiate the social games in capitalist systems from those in their preceding hierarchical social systems. For example, personal or collective wealth accumulation by the big guys in a capitalist society is mainly achieved through legal market transactions instead of predatory deprivation by force. In this sense, the so called democratic political processes and market economy, the core of capitalism, are indeed all entailed consequences of this demand of general fairness within the grand social game that is then titled as capitalism due to the decisive role of capital (i.e. money) in the game.

Because of their dependence upon market for wealth accumulation, capitalist businessmen would not be restrained by the geopolitical borders of their native countries and they would go to the world to sell their products, and to obtain their raw materials as well. Consequently multinational economy would become a basic phenomenon of capitalist economy. In order to have a maximal fairness to everyone in this multinational economy, it would be desired that the uncertainties or variations of the rule of game across the world market could be controlled to a minimal level. This determines that capitalism by nature is outward aggressive in the sense that capitalists or players of the capitalist game would naturally be eager to propagate capitalism as ideology throughout the whole world, not only for the expansion of its market, but also for the desire of fairness that everyone in this world would play by the same rule of game. The need of multinational economy and the desire to have capitalism all over the world would then logically lead to an endeavor of so called globalization: people all over the world would play the same game based upon the same capitalist rule.

It is a common knowledge that in international affairs governments of different (capitalist or noncapitalist) nations would normally place the interests of their countries above the interests of other countries; sometimes they might even go extreme in order to protect the commercial interests of their own countries through espionage or other illegal measures. However, many developed capitalist countries have established laws to prohibit their own people from bribery practices in their overseas business activities. This kind of moral self-contradiction could not be solely explained by the separation of legislative and executive powers. It is not uncommon in world history for the legislative houses to vote for some extreme approaches including wars to protect the interests of their own countries above others. The rationale of prohibiting enterprises from overseas bribery practices might be best interpreted as protecting the fairness between different domestic enterprises in their overseas business activities. Consequently capitalism not only regulates domestic capitalist games played within each capitalist country but also regulates the business activities of their own people in overseas market of capitalist or noncapitalist countries. As a result, people from capitalist countries might face some unfair competition from noncapitalist countries where business morality is less regulated. This would also turn the demand of fairness by people from capitalist countries into a desire to change the social system of noncapitalist countries into capitalist regime all over the world.

2.      Unfairness from the logic of capitalism

Therefore, it is quite fair to say that capitalist system is formed in the history by the demand of fairness and acquires its enormous competitive power from its comparative respect of fairness in capitalist games. However, capitalism as a social logic is indeed also a monstrous source of unfairness in this world which could potentially hinder or even destroy capitalist system itself.  As we have seen from the above discussion that capitalism is a social game driven by the demand of fairness and structured as democratic political scheme plus market economic system. The very common essence of all games of capitalism, as the name literally tells, is capital or more generally speaking money. This essence leads to another fundamental logic, which might be simply called the logic of capitalism, that money (i.e. capital) determines the consequence of social events (and thus the political and economical status) of a society.

Money is the basic media in market economy, and without money there wouldn’t be capitalist economy. For this reason, different from hierarchical social schemes with privileged classes, in a capitalist society, except for very few governmental bureaucratic officials, money is the main power for mobilizing social and natural resources. In fact, the principle of fairness in a capitalist society is also reflected through the respect of the possession and function of money. Therefore, the power of money would naturally sneak into various areas of democratic processes. This might be best demonstrated through the influence of money upon democratic election process and the constitutional legal process. First of all, democratic election is normally influenced by the power of money. As we know that the success of a public campaign would depend largely upon the quality and size of the campaign team. It would be fair to the campaign team members, especially those of high quality, to be well compensated for their hard work, which means that the candidate needs to have enough money available to pay for the members of the team. Besides, nowadays high-tech media and internet promotion provides huge opportunities for candidates to maximize their influences over and attractions to the voters. Those who could have better access to the media and internet campaign might have better chances to win in elections. It would be fair to the media workers to profit from the services they provide to the candidates too. As a result, the democratic election process would be greatly under the mercy of money. Second of all, the constitutional legal process within a capitalist legal system is also influenced by the power of money. Not mentioning the influence of money upon the legislative processes, even in the daily life of ordinary people, an equal sign could easily be drawn between the meaning of justice and the amount of money through the prices of lawyers in the free market of legal assistances, in addition to various legal fees charged by the court. Money could actually influence the justice in a capitalist society through many more approaches as well.

The root cause of social unfairness created by the influence of money is indeed the unequal distribution of money (wealth) across the society. If everyone owns the same amount of money, they could have the fair equal influence in capitalist social life; however, difference, especially severe disparity, in the distribution of social wealth would inevitably have great impact upon social life in an unfair manner. It might be a surprise to many people that market economy, which is formed upon the demand of fairness and is widely deemed as a fair economic system, is indeed the main reason to cause the unequal distribution of social wealth in a capitalist society.

There are two important attributes of a capitalist market economy: 1) it promotes (nominally) fair trading and respects private interests of people; 2) it encourages market based competitions. These two attributes are commonly acknowledged by economists and many ordinary people as the fundamental strengths that differentiate capitalist economy from other economic systems. The first of these two attributes is responsible for producing more to this world and the second is the key factor of rewarding the winner through favored distribution of wealth within the capitalist market system. Because of the free trading, capitalist economy could enjoy the greatest productivity over human history; however, because of the competition, the logic of capitalist economy alone would cause unequal distribution of wealth among people. This unequal distribution of wealth would then be further self-amplified due to the unequal power of utilizing social and natural resources, which would eventually lead to social polarization of wealth among people. Even worse, any technical progress of human civilization, in terms of the efficiency in leveraging natural and social resources as the result of scientific and managerial development, would soon be converted into the controlling power of capital over labor (of both blue and white collars), which would further magnify the gap between rich and poor.

3.      Dealing with the paradox

Consequently, capitalism is such a paradox of fairness: on one hand, capitalism is constructed on the principle of fairness, and even demands a maximal fairness all over the world for capitalist games; on the other hand, it would drive the whole world into an unequal and unfair society by its own logic of so called fair competition. This paradox is an important cause of many crises we are facing today around the world. Obviously, we could not solve this paradoxical problem of fairness caused by capitalism with capitalist logic alone; rather, we need to use something outside the capitalism itself to solve the paradox of capitalism. This means that we need some mechanism that would have the power to redistribute social wealth so that it could counteract the polarizing effect of capitalism, but meanwhile this mechanism should not be also part of the capitalism for otherwise it would bring the whole game back to the original paradoxical cycle.

Taxation is a good example for this role. Taxation could be very well utilized to help offset the trend of polarization created by the nominal fair competition within a capitalist system, and taxation itself is not part of capitalism. However, traditionally the main functionality of taxation has been considered as the means to collect money from the society for centralized usage. Even though fairness has been a consideration during the making of taxation policies in different countries, it has usually not been considered in the sense that taxation should be used as a main mechanism to counteract the polarizing effect of the capitalism. Nonetheless, we need to be very careful to use taxation in this purpose. Overdosed taxation might hurt the foundation of capitalism and cause social instability. What we need is to limit the polarizing effect of capitalism but we don’t want to dismantle the system and its fairness principle of game including respect of private rights and wills.

Once we have a better understanding of the paradoxical nature of capitalism in terms of fairness, philosophically we might need to review many of our social policies including our taxation policies. We need to have a clear idea in the process of policy making that we need to maintain the positive power of capitalism as a result of demanding fairness and in the mean time we also need to systematically work against the polarizing effect of capitalist logic. Otherwise, the intrinsic paradoxical nature of capitalism would not only harm the world economy and stability, but might bring capitalism itself to an end in a suicidal manner.