Capitalism&Government Catch-22 essays

Capitalism&Government Catch-22 essays In his novel, Catch 22, Joseph Heller purposes the negative effects caused by the government and capitalism of the American society during World War II. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, capitalism can be defined as an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods. Heller uses this idea of capitalism to show how it was exploited by the American government during World War II. One basic idea of this exploitation is represented in the passage in chapter 26, where Its certainly is not your leg! Nurse Cramer retorted. That leg belongs to the U.S. government. Its no different than a gear or a bedpan. The Army has invested a lot of money to make you an airplane pilot, and youve no right to disobey the doctors orders. This shows the idea of capitalism that has been blow out of proportion. To the government, soldiers were just considered to be capital good, that could be basically bought and sold. In the case of the novel, the government saw medical attention as an investment. The men were considered to be nothing more than mere war materials as Nurse Cramer exclaims. They are dehumanized to the point where they have as much worth as a bedpan. Just like in the stock market, the government invests in soldiers, and the more that is invested increases the worth of the solider, but not as an individual, but as a group of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Because of this there is no possible way individuality can prevail in this suppressive atmosphere. It would not be unlikely that if one solider was missing, that this solider could never be identified among the many other soldiers that were reported as being missing or dead, and this would have no effect on the government in anyway. The government was set in its ways, and acted as an inhuman war ...