CAPITALISM & ITS DISCONTENTS

The communes and collectives imploded in inefficiency, drowned in blood.

By Jonah Goldberg
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/postopinion.htm
August 2, 2008

It's an old story. Loving parents provide a generous environment for their off spring. Kids are given not only ample food, clothing and shelter, but also the emotional necessities: encouragement, discipline, self-reliance.

Yet, in due course, the kids rebel. Some even say their parents never loved them, 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.

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 denied of cable TV or apple brown betty for dessert.

So it goes with capitalism generally. It's the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery - yet it breeds ingratitude.

People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" Silly question: Poverty is the default human condition, the factory preset of this mortal coil. We're 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 died young, 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 day's end, 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 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, etc.) 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 African nations are vastly richer in baubles and soil than Switzerland. But they're poor because they're impoverished in what they value.

In large measure our wealth isn't the product of capitalism, it is capitalism. 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 entertainments vastly more diverse. 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. 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 loom, politicians dive into their protectionist bunkers. No surprise 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's not zero-sum, but it feels like it is. It 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.