By cross-dressing as progressives and attacking Mitt Romney as an "evil" capitalist, anti-Romney Republicans handed him a golden opportunity. Romney can be, if he is up to it, the much needed defender of capitalism.
Deciding to place "progressive" and "cross-dresser" next to each other in the first sentence of a column about Mitt Romney and capitalism is a bold move. However, the piece is meaty enough that the association is likely to remain sub-conscious for anyone who doesn't trip over it immediately. I'm sure you knew that, though.
Thus far the former venture capitalist has offered only a pragmatic defense of his career in high finance.
Romney's pragmatic defense assumes the moral arguments laid out below. Explaining your assumptions doesn't always strengthen them.
What Americans want and need in a moral justification of capitalism.
That may be what some Americans want and need. I want (among other things) people to stop believing that capitalism is a moral system, and I need nothing that money can buy, at the moment.
More is at stake than just Romney's presidential aspirations..
Here Westover is correct. If people realize that capitalism is immoral, they will probably demand a whole new system. That may have been what was going on with the occupy movement??
Please, Mitt, don't be that guy who defends capitalism as if it is some progressive program for advancement of "the common good." It's not.
Finally we agree wholeheartedly about something! Capitalism isn't about the common good, it's about capital, i.e. money. Flows of money are eased, accumulation of money is encouraged, everything else is valued in terms of the money it could make if it were used or sold. Enthusiasts of capitalism generally argue (as Westover does below) that capitalism is also the best/only way to provide for the greater good, but that's just a side effect in their eyes.
The moral justification of capitalism has nothing to do with either a utilitarian - greatest good for the greatest number - or an altruistic desire to serve the common good. True, the greatest good for the larger community is not an insignificant consequence of capitalism, but the moral justification of free enterprise is more fundamental: Capitalism is the only system consistent with rational human nature.
I am amazed that in a piece about morality, the concept of "the greatest good for the larger community" is considered only "not insignificant." Humans are not, by their nature, exclusively or even primarily rational beings. Doubters of this only need observe the masses at their nearest retail outlet, restaurant or house of worship. Or read a little bit about behavioral economics, psychology, or history. If capitalism is the only anything, it's the only system that assumes that people are rational little value-maximizing abstractions (then sets in on self-fulfilling its prophesy).
Capitalism is the only economic system that relies on voluntary cooperation in the exchange of value.
Competition is the organizing force of capitalism, cooperation is suggested if the cooperating parties would then gain an advantage over another. The idea that exchange is "voluntary" in capitalist systems is slippery. If a person has a hungry family and an ache her guts to feel useful, she'll probably take almost any job. Did she do so in a "voluntary" way? Preying on people's vulnerability and desperation then patting yourself on the back about how everyone's participation was "voluntary" does not a moral justification make, to me.
All other systems require force to distribute scarce resources.
So does capitalism. Check the history books, check the newspaper, check the federal (or state or local) budget. Lots of line items for weapons and people to point them. Perhaps by quibbling this argument could be somewhat revitalized. Capitalism mainly only requires force to prevent the involuntary redistribution of scarce resources for the benefit of someone other than the current owner. The force expended is in service of maintaining the system, but not a part of the system itself, which is merely a system of voluntary exchange. Right?
As author/philosopher Ayn Rand notes, capitalism is the only system founded on the justice of to each his due.
I question the wisdom of quoting Ayn Rand as an authority on anything. What is due to each of us? Every bit of output we can claim we created? Enough to meet our needs? Enough to be comfortable, whatever that means? Are we due the right to keep accumulating crap indefinitely as long as we don't tabulate the myriad ways our consumption has negative effects on other living humans, future generations, and the entire web of life of which we are just a part?
Don't be that guy, Mitt, who defends capitalism by the numbers. Don't call yourself a "job creator." If the only justification of capitalism is that it creates jobs, capitalism is vulnerable
Does the claim that government intervention might create even more jobs say anything about the "greatest good for the larger community"? I actually think that debate might get us somewhere...
While capitalism has provided Americans of all income levels with the highest standard of living in history, it is constantly under attack.
Highest standard of living is defined by capitalism's own measuring stick: Gross Domestic Product, GDP, economic activity per economic unit (dollars in motion per year per human). By this ludicrous device, the explosion of cancer, with its expensive medical treatments, is a sign of our high standard of living. Tearing down a forest to build a new shopping mall represents a huge advance in our standard of living. Most alarmingly, the epidemic of depression, anxiety, ADD etc. that result from living in our society actually shows up in the index as more evidence of our high standard of living (as long as we can afford to buy the prescriptions "needed" to treat these ailments - and the doctor's visits, billing services, research, trials, advertising, special ed, etc. and thus add to the economy).
Again it is Rand who offers insight into why: The lifeline feeding any social system is a culture's dominant philosophy, and few among capitalism's defenders understand or can make the moral case for it.
I'll come clean now. I'm pretty sure that the reason few among capitalism's defenders can make a moral case for it is because no such case exists. I am not aware of any moral authority which would endorse the kind of selfish indifference to those around you that Rand proposes. I would say "imagine" an entire society trying to organize itself around the brilliant but limited observations of Adam Smith, but we're living in it.
"No social system can survive without a moral base," writes Rand. "On the basis of the (prevailing) altruist morality, capitalism had to be - and was - damned from the start."
Translated: "If we can't convince people to stop trying to care for the people around them, capitalism will never make it."
Mitt, America needs someone to build capitalism's moral base.
I think that Mitt is a practical man, and will stick to the more modest and possibly achievable goal of merely being elected President of the United States of America.
Don't be that guy, Mitt, who apologizes for the "creative destruction" component of capitalism. Embrace it. Don't duck reality; deal with it. Competition and constant innovation, the essence of human progress, have consequences that cannot be compromised.
Neither competition nor constant innovation are essential to being human. This mythical "progress" I'm always hearing about confuses me. When did we start progressing, and toward what are we headed? Is there any chance we've "overprogressed" in some ways?
Gingrich supporters have contrasted you, Mitt, with "good capitalist" Steve Jobs, who Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), reflecting the dominant altruistic culture, said was "probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs" because he produced the iPad.
Wait, who is speaking to whom in this run-on sentence? It almost seems like Gingrich supporters, including Jesse Jackson Jr. think Steve Jobs was a good capitalist because he eliminated thousands of American jobs by "producing" the iPad. Did both you and your editor think this was intelligible, or is the obfuscation purposeful?
"What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs?" Jackson said. "What becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not-too-distant future, such jobs simply won't exist."
Is Jackson right? Ought we cast aside our iPad's for the common good?
I thought "would we be better off" is not a relevant question. I'd say yes, but then I'd get way off on a tangent.
How is Apple's iPad different from Bain Capital's creation Staples?
Mostly not, but also dramatically: iPad is (or more precisely tablet computers are) a new and different way to send and receive information (as compared to books and stationery). Staples is just squeezing every drop of (dollars out per dollar in) efficiency from the existing products. iPad is a tangible object, Staples is just a marketing plan draped over a logistics and human resources system. iPad can at least claim that laid off book binders will find work in the beautiful new world ushered in by its wonderful new technology of easy information flow. Staples may offer the former owner of a stationery store one of the two part-time jobs he'll need to make shorter ends meet with a little bit of a stretch. I doubt he'll have the time or energy to draft the handwritten letters he spent his idle entrepreneur time composing to friends and family on the samples stationery suppliers left him. Oh well, they only added 45 cents each to the economy anyway...
How many Main Street mom-and-pop stationery stores were put out of business by Staples?
My guess is thousands.
What multiple of people lost jobs for every single job created at Staples?
Shot in the dark, but I'd say 3:1, and the old jobs were objectively and subjectively "better" by and large.
Would we be better off if Staples or the iPad ceased to exist?
Clearly, I'd say. Arguably, in any case. But aren't we being distracted by the greater good again?
"Not at all," writes Tom Keane in the Boston Globe. "Staples succeeded because it was able to deliver wanted products to consumers more cheaply and more effectively. At the macroeconomic level, it improved productivity, a very good thing which in the long run should create more wealth and more jobs. Still, try explaining that to the owners of shuttered stationery stores.
Try explaining it to anyone who doesn't already take for granted that "free-market capitalism" is the best and final economic model! "It's good that the little stationary store in your neighborhood closed. A half-dozen of them plus some copy stores and an art supply store all closed after Staples opened. That's good though, because now you can drive four miles over to Staples and get some perfectly acceptable stationery. If save up a few shopping trips, you'll come out dollars ahead even once you account for the wear and tear on your car. It probably takes longer and you'll miss out on the exercise, but there is a gym near Staples that you could join. Your friendship with the stationery store owner never showed up in the ledger book anyway. So, with all the little bits of money saved by everybody buying stationery at Staples, there should be money to invest in new ventures. Those new ventures should create jobs for the people who lost theirs when their business 'couldn't compete' against Staples. Everybody wins. Well, not everybody, but overall. Plus, it's the only possible way, given that man yearns to be free..." Read the original quote again, with the positive judgments highlighted in red:
Staples succeeded because it was able to deliver wanted products to consumers more cheaply and more effectively. At the macroeconomic level, it improved productivity, a very good thing which in the long run should create more wealth and more jobs.
That's a vaguely true story, moralistically told, but morally vacant.
That's your challenge, Mitt - explaining capitalism to people who see themselves as victims of others' success - a vision reinforced by President Obama's State of the Union address.
Your challenge, Mitt - explaining how people who see themselves as the victims of others' poverty, laziness and stupidity can claim to be the arbiters of morality. Explaining how self-interest is a worthy principle around which to organize a society, while altruism is a recipe for disaster.
Yours, Mitt, is not explaining your taxes or defending Bain Capital; yours is nothing less than defending capitalism itself, and the defense of capitalism is a first and foremost a moral argument.
Or rather, "We better get people buying into our moral arguments more strongly or we're in trouble."
Unlike the reliance on force in the guise of mandates, regulations and arbitrary laws, capitalism is based on individual rights, the sanctity of private property and preservation of the rule of law.
Is there an easy way to distinguish between "arbitrary laws" which are just force in masquerade, and "the rule of law" upon which capitalism is nobly based? Are there any mandates or regulations that are justified to protect individual rights? Most of all, let's not slide past the phrase "sanctity of private property." Really? Is it the property itself that is a sacred thing, or does the holiness only describe the god-like ability to "own" "things"? Private property is a new and strange idea that only a small fraction of history's humans would even recognize as possible. I think that modern culture does deify the ability to own property and also the property itself. I fail to see how this observation strengthens the moral case for capitalism.
Capitalism relies not on the force of progressivism or big government conservatism, but on voluntary cooperation.
The force is there, certainly in any system as practiced, as noted above. In the most doctrinaire proposals for libertarian free-market capitalism I've heard, the primary domestic role of the state is as the enforcer of contracts between free individuals. I have inferred that in such scenarios the state would retain essentially exclusive right to use force? To restate the "voluntary" objection: I have been employed in several occupations in my life. In each and every case I sought the employment as the most reasonable way to get some money, the only thing of value to the merchants which serve as my nearly exclusive access point for needs and desires (from clean water and shelter to airline tickets and mp3 players) in my world. Never did I enter the employer-employee relationship without feeling a level of systematic coercion significant enough for me to at least place an asterisk next to the word "voluntary" in my description of the transaction. I do not feel I'm in the minority on this one.
Capitalism is the only system worthy of men and women endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It's strange that you allude to the creator to lend gravity to your case, but the quote is from the Declaration of Independence. Maybe you meant creator to be Thomas Jefferson, and the Creator wasn't involved? If you were meaning to invoke the Creator, I would suggest you look into spinning lilies and camels squeezing through needles, then reconsider what it means to pursue happiness. (Maybe the Bible isn't your book, but I've never seen anything more spiritual than Atlas Shrugged propose that altruism is a vice). As many times as I've seen capitalism called "the only" something, I am beginning to wonder whether that -ism should sound more like "devotion to" rather than "practice of."
Communicating the morality of capitalism is a big and thankless job, Mitt. Just ask Ron Paul.
Finding a way to communicate the fundamental immorality of capitalism is a tough and thankless job, Craig
just ask
No comments:
Post a Comment