I read this, and would have commented there, but of course they did not offer a place to make comments.
In broad stroke, most modern intellectual call “Capitalism” literally everything they don’t like about the world. Every visionary fantasy they can concoct from their places of muted emotional capacity, substandard social integration, profound moral stuntedness, and functional irresponsibility they claim is made impossible by our “economic system.”
This basic, obvious fact is largely made invisible by their unwillingness–indeed, inability, from several generations or more of lost practice–to speak clearly, and in ways amenable to concrete, gradualistic policy.
India was socialist from its independence to the early 1990’s. During that time it stagnated. Starvation was common. Horrific poverty was endemic.
Then they got smart, and India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Its people are hungry now for innovation, scientific prowess, and earned national pride.
Inequality is a moral issue only for imbeciles. Resentment, yes, is a moral problem, best dealt with on the moral plain. Trying to make the world fit your notions of how it should be–when done with no sense of empathy, connection, or sense of what it means to be human–is inherently vicious, violent, and the progenitor of horrors, pain, and mass death. We have seen this over and over and over. But the keepers of history refuse to learn the lesson.
Free markets, the right to private property, and enforceable contract law are merely economic innovations which make mass wealth and technological development possible. They say nothing about what makes life worthwhile, nor should they. You cannot make moral critiques of an economic system without having something intelligent to say about what we should DO with the money, and to do that, you need some sound point to human life. These idiots never provide that. They circle around, assume it, ignore it, but never get to it.
It is odd that this character would have been connected to Tagore. I have been reading Gitanjali daily. Tagore speaks of God, of the inherent value and wisdom of hard work, of grace. He speaks of a world where the poor and rich are equal, and can both live in dignity and peace. His is a world very far from the Procrustean bed of orthodox socialism which, valuing nothing, demands we all be equally debased and defrauded of any chance of realizing our soul’s destiny.