Unfettered Capitalism has Broken Boots Theory
And it’ll break the world soon enough.
Unfettered capitalism is, to put it simply, bad. Many of us can probably agree with that to some degree. Whether you think its benefits outweigh its shortcomings or whether you feel like we need to start moving toward fully-automated luxury gay space communism, I think that most of us can see that modern capitalism has some major flaws that need addressing.
And, as with many social issues, Terry Pratchett was on the bleeding edge of identifying many of the social issues that are coming to a head today. In his 1989 book Guards! Guards!, a character named Sam Vimes lays out what has become known as “Boots Theory.” It goes as follows:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and…
