Posted on 08/01/2008 7:47:41 AM PDT by Toddsterpatriot
It’s an old story. Loving parents provide a generous environment for their offspring. Kids are given not only ample food, clothing and shelter, but the emotional necessities as well: encouragement, discipline, self-reliance, the ability to work with others and on their own. And yet, in due course, the kids rebel. Some even say their parents never loved them, that they were unfair, indifferent, cruel. Often, such protests are sparked by parents’ refusal to be even more generous. I want a car, demands the child. Work for it, insist the parents. Why do you hate me? asks the ingrate.
Of course, being an old story doesn’t make it a universal one. But the dynamic is universally understood.
We’ve all witnessed the tendency to take a boon for granted. Being accustomed to a provision naturally leads the human heart to consider that provision an entitlement. Hence the not-infrequent lawsuits from prison inmates cruelly denied their rights to cable TV or apple brown betty for desert.
And so it goes, I think, with capitalism generally.
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
People ask, “Why is there poverty in the world?” It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.
The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”
At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.
For generations, many thought prosperity was material stuff: factories and forests, gold mines and gross tons of concrete poured. But we now know that these things are merely the fringe benefits of wealth. Stalin built his factories, Mao paved over the peasants. But all that truly prospered was misery and alienation.
A recent World Bank study found that a nation’s wealth resides in its “intangible capital” — its laws, institutions, skills, smarts and cultural assumptions. “Natural capital” (minerals, croplands, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, roads, and so on) account for less than a quarter of the planet’s wealth. In America, intangible capital — the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books — accounts for 82 percent of our wealth.
Any number of countries in Africa are vastly richer in baubles and soil than Switzerland. But they are poor because they are impoverished in what they value.
In large measure our wealth isn’t the product of capitalism, it is capitalism.
And yet we hate it. Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago. His food is better, his life longer, his health better, his menu of entertainments vastly more diverse, his toilette infinitely more civilized. And yet we constantly hear how cruel capitalism is while this collectivism or that is more loving because, unlike capitalism, collectivism is about the group, not the individual.
These complaints grow loudest at times like this: when the loom of capitalism momentarily stutters in spinning its gold. Suddenly, the people ask: What have you done for me lately? Politicians croon about how we need to give in to Causes Larger than Ourselves and peck about like hungry chickens for a New Way to replace dying capitalism.
This is the patient leaping to embrace the disease and reject the cure. Recessions are fewer and weaker thanks in part to trade, yet whenever recessions appear on the horizon, politicians dive into their protectionist bunkers. Not surprising that this week we saw the demise of the Doha round of trade negotiations, and this campaign season we’ve heard the thunder of anti-trade rhetoric move ever closer.
This is the irony of capitalism. It is not zero-sum, but it feels like it is. Capitalism coordinates humanity toward peaceful, productive cooperation, but it feels alienating. Collectivism does the opposite, at least when dreamed up on paper. The communes and collectives imploded in inefficiency, drowned in blood. The kibbutz lives on only as a tourist attraction, a baseball fantasy camp for nostalgic socialists. Meanwhile, billions have ridden capitalism out of poverty.
And yet the children of capitalism still whine.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Adam Smith/Ayn Rand-style capitalism has been supplanted by a mercantilist cabal, who are trying to use government power to guarantee themselves future profits regardless of the quality of their goods and services. The objections on FR are to the actions and vast influence of this cabal, not to the principles of capitalism. No one here thinks the Obamas of the world have the right answers, just that the Citigroups and JP Morgans and Boeings and GMs are in no way white knights of economic freedom - as Republicans too often believe.
I see your point, but define slave labor. If it means being paid less than union work in the U.S. or even the non-union prevailing wage here, many of those so-called slaves might beg to differ if their wages, however small compared to ours means their survival. Are those people forced to work for the “modern capitalists”? Nations have brought themselves up out of bondage frequently by putting up with serious hardships in order to build a better future. Today the argument with illegal immigration is that the immigrants are slaving away here to send money back to the homeland and someday buy their own business back home.
Every economic system has its possibilities of abuse but the question is whether a person has a choice not to put up with the abuse. Socialist countries tend to make everyone equally abused. Capitalist countries give one the option to put up with it or not, depending on their own initiative.
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery"
This is exactly what I try to point out to my socialism-leaning liberal acquaintances. And yet they never see the light. sigh.
I don’t see capitalism as a “loving parent” so if that is what the article implies, you’ll get no argument from me. As to whether economic systems have borders, well, yes and no. It transcends borders but only where the governments within those borders allow it to do so. If you are looking for some form of pure capitalism, or even pure socialism, you won’t find it anywhere. Governments are the antipathy and corrupter of both, even though they are also the enablers of the economic systems. My point is that one a local scale, real capitalism means people looking out for their neighbor (because that’s the only way to make money for yourself), as opposed to real socialism where the people look out for themselves and demand the government look out for everyone else.
On an international level, clearly abuses happen but I still argue that “slave labor” in these days in more a matter of perception, or comparison, than truth. As another post pointed out, 82% of America’s wealth is attributed to its non-material wealth, i.e., education, attitude, rule of law and so forth. That kind of wealth cannot be handed out like loans from the IMF. It has to be developed from within, and sometimes that takes struggles like our forebears went through, including what we might consider now slave labor. Tough times builds tough people, and tough people build tough societies that can sustain and control capitalism. The question on international capitalism abuses is not whether the capitalist is getting a good deal in labor wages but whether the workers are getting a good deal, given their options. It might make anti-globalists feel good to drive Nike out of third-world countries but should it do so if it causes Nike’s former employees to starve to death, or sell their bodies to avoid it?
Actually I am getting into a little bit of my rant about exporting a lot of what we have here in the United States. We look at what is nice here and figure it would be nice for everyone in the world. Ideally, it might be but pragmatically, it might literally kill. Too many Americans, especially the radical types, think that what America has is a simple, reproducible phenomenom. Instead it is a system and society built upon a very substantial foundation of constitutional freedoms, education, culture, language, history, work ethic and rule of law, not to mention our common Judeo-Christian philosophy. You cannot take this mansion of America and set it up without the same sturdy foundation unless you are willing to watch it collapse at the first instance of adversity. All you can do is show the world how to set up the foundation and let them build their own mansions.
I think you took his analogy in the beginning one or two steps too far.
Capitalism without the general public morality/religion that promotes sobriety in the prevelant public discourse is doomed to failure. The prosperity economic freedom brings also supports self-destructive guilt and other vices that less affluent societies cannot sustain. The whining that plagues much of political philosophy today attacks the very system that makes their petulance possible, threatening to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
If this article is an example of how well Jonah Goldberg writes, then I have to buy his book.
But they are poor because they are impoverished in what they value! LOL!
Please see the title of the article, the author is arguing that capitalism is some sort of Mother...
These tiresome authors complain Americans don’t know what’s good for them, and only they should be able to tell us what it is we should have. They are the nanny statists.
Sorry, I read the column . . . let me know when you get around to it.
Why is there such angst and hostility in the land of plenty?
Remembering ... man does not live by bread alone.
Nope, don’t see a religion reference there, either. I think you have issues.
BOOKMARK
The spoiled children of capitalism- nope no reference to capitalism being the parent , nope not there.
Capitalism the greatest system for alleviating human misery? What a pompous arrogant statement coming from an agitprop artist for the globalists.
I’m tellin’ ya’, you should really get around to reading the column. Then you might understand the analogy.
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