Reality
is resilient. Ignore it, reshape it,
mistreat it as we may, it bounces back.
After many decades of abuse at the hands of its socialist reformers, the
world of hard economic fact and of unchanging human nature has again raised its
head to assert that true wealth resides not in measurable, divisible, allegedly
manageable lumps of dead matter, and not in the state-controlled means of
production, but in the creativity and genius of the human mind freely doing
what it was designed to do: “replenish the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1: 28).
We
humans have tackled the task of replenishing and subduing the earth in many
ways, very few of which have met with success. Each of us enters the world with
little else than a fallen nature, and most of us exit this life in virtually
the same condition. Poverty, ignorance, and bondage are not the exception in
human history -- they are the norm. Only rarely and with great difficulty have
we ever extricated ourselves from their vice-like grip. When we do escape, it behooves
us to ponder carefully how that escape was orchestrated, and how it might be
reproduced for the sake of our fellows. By means of such careful reflection, we
discover that the secret to sustained economic prosperity is nothing else but
what Michael Novak labeled “democratic capitalism,” that happy combination of
self-government under law coupled with an extensively unencumbered marketplace.
No
other political and economic system has been able to deliver political freedom
and economic prosperity in anything like the lavish way democratic capitalism
has produced them.
The
proof is not hard to find. One need only look as far back as World War II to
discern that the free market greatly outperforms the command economy in any and
all of its partial or plenary manifestations. Japan, for example, was on the
losing side the war effort and suffered nuclear destruction — twice. Its land
area and population are both comparatively small. Its natural resources are
significantly limited. Nevertheless, Japan’s economy and its standard of living
far outstrip those of the Soviet Union, which, like Japan, suffered extensive
damage during the war, but which, unlike Japan, did not rise from the ashes
like a phoenix, despite the fact that it was on the winning side of the conflict,
despite the fact that it was given all of Eastern Europe as a gift (a gift
which its primitive economic system could neither sustain nor retain), and
despite the fact that it has more people, more land and more natural resources
than Japan.
A similar
comparison could be made between North and South Korea, mainland China and
either Hong Kong or Taiwan, East and West Germany (while they were divided),
and India and South Africa (the largest and second largest examples of
apartheid in the world). Both the production performance and the standard of
living of First World free market economies consistently dwarf those of Second
World socialist systems.
Even
if one were to focus only on countries of the Third World, where the problem of
poverty is most acute, the evidence is unambiguous: those nations that place
greater reliance on the market process, such as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and South
Korea, embarrass those nations that rely on state-directed production and
consumption, such as India, Tanzania, and Mozambique.
One
cannot attribute the unmatched Third World prosperity of free market nations to
the foreign aid they have allegedly received from the West. Nor can one blame
the backwardness of those nations that do not flourish on the lingering effects
of colonialism. Some of the most well developed nations of the Third World are
former col- onies, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, while some of the
very poorest nations of the Third World, like Ethiopia, Nepal, Tibet, and
Afghanistan, were never Western colonies at all. In fact, some of the
wealthiest nations in the world, the United States, Canada, and Australia among
them, are themselves former colonies. Furthermore, massive amounts of Western
aid have been poured into countries that remain resolutely poor, like
Kampuchea, Uganda, Pakistan, and Nigeria. They remain poor because most of the
reasons for national poverty are domestic and systemic. Until the
underdeveloped nations unleash the productive forces of the marketplace, they
and the millions of poor whose wretched lot it is to live within their
borders will continue in unrelenting want.
But
market economies are not so. As Brian Griffiths observes,
It so happens that as a matter of history it was
the market economy which brought about the transformation of the Western world
from widespread poverty to the level of prosperity which it now enjoys. In the
mid-eighteenth century, life in England was comparable to that in many Third World countries
today: low real income, little education, poor housing, widespread disease and
short life expectancy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the situation had
changed dramatically. Real incomes had quadrupled, education was wide- spread,
the housing stock had grown dramatically and life expectancy had increased. In
no small measure this was due to the ability of the market economy to harness
the inventiveness and entrepreneurial resources of ordinary people . . .
[M]arket economies create wealth more efficiently than either state- owned or
state-planned economies. It is true in developed countries; it is also true in
developing countries.1
In
other words, if as a Christian one is intent upon easing the conditions of the
poor and pushing back the boundaries of poverty and destitution, then
democratic capitalism has far more to recommend it than any other system of
political economy ever devised. Under no other system have the poor been raised
as far so quickly, and in such great numbers. Marxism, by contrast, is the
cause of sustained poverty, not its solution. In short, to condemn democratic
capitalism, one must first misrepresent its history.
But
though democratic capitalism flourishes, the human past in general has by no
means been a story of unrelenting prosperity and freedom; it is a litany of
tyranny, famines, illiteracy, plagues, war, oppression, infant death, and mere
subsistence. For most of the people who ever lived, life is exactly what Thomas
Hobbes said it was — nasty, brutish, and short. The life we enjoy in the modern
Western world is a rare commodity in human history. It is a blessing of immense
magnitude, seldom given, and never so lavishly as now.
But,
like most of the blessings we enjoy, freedom and prosperity do not come to us
fully formed, directly from the hand of God. God is a sharing God; He rarely
does anything on His own the doing of which He can share with His creatures.
Freedom and prosperity are no exception. They are mediated blessings, mediated
by the development of human insight, effort, and sacrifice, which alone can
produce the life we enjoy. Thus, as a Christian theologian, I acknowledge both
the divine source of our blessedness and the human means whereby it was
actualized. I thank God; and I recognize that liberty under law and a
marketplace controlled by little else than the morally enlightened preferences
of its freely engaged participants constitute the sine qua non of
political freedom and economic prosperity.
Democratic capitalism succeeds where other systems
fail because it is more firmly rooted in the inescapable facts of economic
scar- city, of incomplete knowledge, and of human imperfectability. That is,
among the various competing systems of governance and production, democratic
capitalism takes the fullest account of reality. It understands that human
desires normally tend to outstrip the supply of goods and services available to
satisfy those desires. It understands that none of us knows all we need to know
in order to make the very best use of the means and the goods available to us
(much less to make the wisest possible economic decisions for countless
thousands, perhaps millions, of people with whom we are utterly unfamiliar, as
must be the case in any system of central planning). It understands that we
humans are an incorrigibly selfish lot. Democratic capitalism has learned to
take these factors into account by devising a system of exchange that harnesses
human self-interest in the service of others and in the satisfaction of their
desire and needs. More than 200 years ago, Adam Smith captured this fact so
memorably:
As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much
as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and
so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every
individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as
great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public
interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of
domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by
directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest
value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases,
led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By
pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more
effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much
good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.2
But
the Marxists have not learned that important economic lesson, nor any number
of a vast array of lessons that they could have and should have learned from
the world around them and from Marxism’s own dismal record in that world. No
religion, no political system, and no means of production can prosper if it is
not firmly rooted in things as they are rather than things as we would like
them to be. Precisely here Marxism fails. Rather than beginning with the hard
facts of reality, and rather than constructing a theory of governance and
production that takes those facts into account by conforming their thoughts to
extra-mental reality, the Marxists foolishly believe that political and
economic institutions can be moulded at will to conform to the political vision
in their heads. It cannot. Of Marxism’s numerous cognitive failures, I mention
but five.
I.
Marxism entails a faulty view of human nature
Marxists
do not seem to realize that human institutions arise from human action; that
human action arises from human nature; and that human nature is notoriously
intractable. The problem of the human heart is at the heart of the human
problem. The human heart, the Bible says, is desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:
9). But this the Marxists do not comprehend. They seem not to know what
Alexander Hamilton knew: the science of public policy is the knowledge of human nature. Try
as they may, the Marxists cannot succeed so long as human nature remains what
it is: marginally (sometimes extensively) unloving, ungiving, and untamed.
Marxism cannot succeed because it has no way to harness human depravity for the
service of others. Instead, it depends upon altruism where little or none
exists, and it supplies no incentive for that altruism to be cultivated.
But
democratic capitalism is not so. Unlike Marxism, democratic capitalism enjoys
unprecedented success because it takes into account the undeniable fact of
human nature. People, being what they are, respond to incentives. Democratic
capitalism succeeds where other systems fail or flounder because within it the
interests of the individual coincide with, and serve, the interests of others,
by means of incentives. In democratic capitalism, one does not normally succeed
without first serving the needs and interests of others in a way that others
find acceptable and at a price those others deem fair.
Within Marxism, however, the needs and desires of
the private individual are cut loose from those of society at large. In
Marxism, the individual’s incentives toward productivity and creativity are
vitiated, if not eradicated, because no matter how hard he works he will not
get further ahead, and no matter how poorly he works, he will not lose. As
Ludwig von Mises made clear,
In the socialist system, in which all the fruits of
the various individuals’ labor are appropriated by the supreme office of
production management and then redistributed among the comrades without any
regard for the worth of their individual contribution, there is no inducement
for an individual to exert his strength . . . The superiority of the
capitalistic system of production is due to the fact that it remunerates
everybody according to his contribution to the satisfaction of his fellow men.
It thus stimulates everybody, within the system of the division of labor, to
exert himself to the utmost. The better a man serves others, the better for
him. In the capitalistic market economy the consumers are supreme. In his
capacity as a producer of commodities and services everybody is forced to serve
the consumers.3
Because
it ignores human nature, socialist production falls off; needs are not met;
people are not satisfied; poverty is not reduced. If under- standing the nature
and limitations of human beings is the beginning of political wisdom, then the
Marxists have yet to begin.
II.
Marxism entails a faulty view of cause and effect
The
Marxists do more than ignore that which cannot be ignored, they also confuse
cause and effect by believing the fallacy that economic conditions and the
social and political circumstances that attach to them serve to shape
everything and everyone. They have never stopped to ask themselves what (or
who) changes economic conditions, and why.
Public
policy and political theory are enacted only by real and identifiable human
beings, not by any alleged impersonal forces of change set loose in the world
at large. Individual human beings are the true movers and shakers in political
affairs, not “the spirit of the age,” not the “the winds of freedom and equality,”
not “historically determined class struggle,” not even “ideas whose time has
come.” People are responsible for hatching failed economic policies, for
inciting Marxist revolutions, and for inter-racial oppression, on the one hand,
as well as for the acquisition and maintenance of political freedom and
material prosperity, on the other. Until the Marxists recognize from whence
arise both human failures and human successes, they will continue to generate
ill-conceived policies. It can be no other way. No answers are possible until
the Marxists discover who is answerable; and until they discover who is
answerable, they chase illusory excuses and imaginary scapegoats. Human actors
excepted, nearly everything is a mirage in the events of the political arena
and of the marketplace. Behind nearly every political and economic result, both
good and bad, lies a human cause.
But
Marxist taxonomy and the worldview it embodies permit no such conclusion.
Marxist nomenclature ignores the obvious fact that only individuals exist.
Rather than beginning with the irreducible fact of the fallen human individual,
rather than building its theory on the basis of individual dignity, worth,
autonomy, and sinfulness, Marxism sees only classes, aggregates, and masses,
never realizing that such things are merely their own interpretations of
reality, and not reality itself. As Marc Bloch observed in a different context, a nomenclature
that is thrust upon the external world rather than derived from it will always
end by distorting the world because it raises its own failed interpretive
categories to the level of the true and the eternal.
Classes,
as such, do not exist. Only fallen individual human beings exist. Classes are a
sociologist’s fiction, a shorthand method of identifying and interpreting the
great many billions of individuals who now live or who have lived upon this
planet. In that way, Marxist theory is the political and sociological
equivalent of philosophical realism and, as a result, has most of philosophical
realism’s attendant strengths and weaknesses, reification among them. I cannot
explain it any more plainly than has Rose Wilder Lane:
In the human world there is no entity but the
individual per- son . . . So far as Society has any existence, it exists when
boy meets girl, when Mrs. Jones telephones Mrs. Smith, when Robinson buys a
cigar, when the motorist stops for gasoline . . .when the postman delivers the
mail and the labor bosses discuss a strike . . . and the dentist says ‘Wider,
please.’ Human relationships are so infinitely numerous and varying every
moment, that no human mind can begin to grasp them. To call these relationships
Society, and then discuss the welfare or progress of Society, as if it existed
as a bee swarm does, is simply to escape from reality to fairyland.4
Such
ideas are not new. Centuries ago Aristotle understood that those with money and
those without were likely to be mentally and socially crippled by the distorted
way they viewed each other as only either rich or poor, rather than as individual
human beings. Modern Marxists are subject to the same ancient interpretive
delusion to which Aristotle alluded. Marxist taxonomy binds Marxists — and
those over whom they rule — in the chains of error. The Marxists not only see
aggregates where only individuals exist, they also see only imperialists,
revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. That is, the Marxists
not only fall afoul of the fallacy of aggregation, they apply laudatory or
pejorative labels to the aggregates they have created, and thereby applaud or
condemn millions of individuals for no other reason than that those individuals
happen to fall into one or the other artificial category. For such “offenses”
millions of people, quite literally, have died.
But,
though people rule the world, and not impersonal forces or faceless masses, one
must not conclude that therefore ideas are either unimportant or
inconsequential. As Richard Weaver properly observed, ideas have consequences.
But ideas do not have con- sequences apart from the people who conceive them,
refine them, and apply them. Thus, on their own, ideas do not lead us places;
we take them somewhere. Only to the extent that people act upon their beliefs
do ideas have consequences. People do not always do so; but when they do, they
themselves are the active agents in history, not their mental conceptions.
III.
Marxism entails a faulty view of justice
The
Marxists mistakenly believe that justice is synonymous with equality. It is
not. Justice is not having the same as your neighbor, regardless of differences
in skill, investment, effort, ownership, worth, and chance. Nor is justice the
same as confiscating the personal property of some in order to give it to those
who have no moral or legal claim upon it. Justice is not synonymous with either
equality or coercive redistribution. Justice is having what is yours by
inheritance, by hard work, by legal purchase, and by good fortune, provided
such possessions have come to you apart from coercion and deceit. Justice is
the same as equality only for those people and in those circumstances that are
truly equal. Such people and such circumstances, however, are exceedingly rare.
We human beings, and the varying circumstances in which we find ourselves, are
not equal. Whatever else they may be, things that are all the same are not
human. Things that are not truly the same are not equal. To misunderstand this
fact is to misunderstand justice. To misunderstand justice is to set a course
for political and economic failure. As Brian Griffiths explains,
To aim for after-tax equality of income as a major
objective of economic policy has three basic difficulties associated with it.
By blunting the incentives of economic life to start with, it would discourage
enterprise and reduce the real income of the society as a whole. Next, it would
seem to many un- fair not to allow differentials in wages based on such things
as training costs, risk, mobility, hard work, and innovation. Finally, the kind
of society which typically decides to abolish inequality of income and wealth
ends up creating inequality based on political power because of the discretion
it invests in government.5
But
the Bible makes no such error. Rather than denouncing economic differences, the
Bible presupposes them, as Christ’s parable of the talents (Matthew 25: 14-30)
demonstrates. In it, Christ indicates that God’s just judgment of human beings
is based upon their wise stewardship of the varied gifts (financial and
otherwise) that He has entrusted to them, not upon either the allegedly
egalitarian initial al- location of those gifts or upon their egalitarian final
disbursement. Shrewd investment, not redistribution, calls forth the divine
encomium “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (vv. 21, 23).
The
specific political economy a Christian finally endorses can- not be pulled from
a hat. Rather, one’s political view is chosen by careful reflection upon
Christianity’s fundamental truths and upon the relationship of those
fundamental truths to the presuppositions of the political or economic theory
under consideration, as well as upon that theory’s historical record. But of
those varied historical and philosophical considerations, the ethical must
predominate. Mere productivity and efficiency are not enough. Christians can properly
endorse only those policies that are just both in their ends and in their
means. Thus, while assisting the poor is an admirable and biblical endeavor,
coercion and theft are not. The biblical means of alleviating another’s
distress is not coercive redistribution by the state, it is that act of
selfless charity practiced by the good Samaritan: personal involvement and
compassionate private largesse (Luke 10: 30-37). The good Samaritan himself
came to the aid of his suffering brother. He did not lobby Congress to fund
another massive, ineffective and wasteful giveaway, made possible only by a
large-scale, coercive confiscation of private property. Those who depend upon
the state to be an effective means of philanthropy must first ignore the fact
that the modern state is not normally an agency of Christian love. Quite the
contrary; the modern state has been the cause of more deaths (approximately 100
million) in this century than in all other centuries combined. Nor do the
socialist redistributers of other people’s property seem to realize that
despite his good intentions, Robin Hood was a thief.
IV.
Marxism entails a faulty view of private property
By
abolishing private property rights, Marxism has cut economic re- wards loose
from risk taking, from effort, and from saving. Human beings simply cannot be
relied upon to make the careful and painstaking evaluations necessary to
assess the real possibilities for success or failure before taking
entrepreneurial risks when neither the profits gained from such risks nor the
losses incurred from such risks are theirs. Nor can investment capital be
accumulated except from the profits of prior endeavors, the use of which has
been sacrificed for the present in order to make possible (but not certain)
greater prosperity in the future. In a low-efficiency system like Marxism,
where prof- its already tend to be very small, workers will be unwilling to
work harder to raise a company’s profit margin or to endure intensified deprivation for the purpose of funding future endeavors that are not likely to be
successful, or, if they are successful, will not yield profits to them but to
the state. A socialist economy does not permit people to reap for themselves
the rewards of their hard work, shrewdness, and abstinence. For that reason, if
for no other, socialism will never be as successful as democratic capitalism.
When private property rights disappear, so does the entrepreneurial spirit.
Incentive is tied inextricably to ownership.
The
Marxist denial of private property rights is not only inefficient, it is
unbiblical and contradicts the clear teaching of both Testaments. In the Hebrew
Scriptures, for example, the Decalogue forbids both theft and the evil desires
that frequently give rise to theft by declaring “Thou shalt not steal” and
“Thou shalt not covet” (Exodus 20: 15, 17). As John Chamberlain correctly
explains,
“Thou shalt not steal” means that the Bible
countenances private property — for if a thing is not owned in the first place
it can scarcely be stolen. “Thou shalt not covet” means that it is sinful even
to contemplate the seizure of another man’s goods — which is something which
socialists, whether Christian or other, have never managed to explain away.
Furthermore, the prohibitions against false witness and adultery mean that
contracts should be honored and double-dealing eschewed. As for the commandment
to “honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long,” this implies
that the family, not the state, is the basic continuing unit and constitutive element of
society.6
The New
Testament is no different. In his parables on the talents (mentioned
above), on the unjust steward (Luke 16: 1-13), and on the pounds (Luke 19:
11-27), Christ was concerned to underscore the virtue of properly managing and
utilizing one’s resources in the best interest both of oneself and the Kingdom
of God. From these and other passages, it is clear that Jesus does not condemn
private property, work, business, investment, saving, or wealth. He does,
however, condemn covetousness, greed, and neglecting both the needs of others
and those of one’s own soul. Christ is well aware of the spiritual hazards of
wealth, and He warns us against them. But that does not mean that money is evil
or that possessing it is wicked. The love of money, not money itself, is
the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6: 10). By the same token, spiritual hazards
also attach to poverty, such as crime, envy, and bitterness. After all, it is
not the poor, but the poor in spirit — that is, the repentant — who inherit the
Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 5: 3). Jesus condemns not wealth, but avarice. In
the former instance, you have money; in the latter instance, it has you.
In
short, the New Testament does not view private property as a problem in itself.
Rather, it endorses it. In the one instance where the New Testament era
Christians practiced community of goods (Acts 2: 44), the experiment seems to
have proved a failure, for shortly afterward we discover that bureaucratic
miscarriage in the redistribution of goods as well as increasing poverty in the
ranks (conditions not at all unrelated or atypical of socialist systems on any
scale) led to complaints and to divisions among believers (Acts 6: 1). In other
words, socialism is a system that not even the apostles themselves could make
work.
But
here I must digress for one paragraph. Like the Marxists, the secular
libertarians make a fundamental error with regard to private property. They do
so by believing that their bodies and their lives are in fact their own, and
that, because they are their own, they can do with them as they please. But the
secular libertarians are wrong. Neither the bodies we inhabit nor we ourselves
belong to us. These things are doubly, even trebly, God’s. That is, what a man
makes belongs to a man. He owns the fruit of his labor. What a man purchases is
his. He owns what
he buys. By the same token, we ourselves are God’s. He both created us and
purchased us from sin at the cost of his own Son. In Paul’s words, “You are not
your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6: 19, 20). Furthermore,
we know we must not despoil a man of his home. Our bodies, so to speak, are the
home of God. As Paul asks in the same passage, “Do you not know that your body
is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” (1
Corinthians 6: 19). We also know that ownership entails the privilege of both
use and disposal. Because it does, and because we are God’s, the secular
libertarian cannot do with (or to) himself anything he sees fit and then try
justify his actions on the grounds that they injure no one else and are
therefore morally acceptable. They are not. Secular libertarians expropriate
from God what is rightfully his — the very action those same libertarians
properly condemn when done to them by the state. Nor can a feminist any longer
claim that the fetus growing within her is her own body and that she may do
with her body whatever she pleases. Abortion, in other words, not only despoils the rights of the one growing within her, it is a trespass against the
property rights of God. So also is suicide.
Marxists make egregious errors regarding the
expropriation of private property, but that failing is not exclusively Marxist.
V.
Marxism entails a faulty view of the
nature of wealth
The
Marxists have believed for too long that the inevitable scarcity of economic
goods, on the one hand, and the equally inescapable condition of human
depravity and the ignorance, poverty, and misery to which it gives rise, on the
other hand, were somehow susceptible to solution by the state-sponsored
machinations of an oppressive interventionist government and the command
economy it always produces. Marxists seem to focus more on the egalitarian
redistribution of wealth than on the most effective means of producing that
wealth. They seem not to understand that one cannot redistribute what has not
been produced. If one’s system of production does not create the goods, then no
matter how one slices the pie, the economic status of the nation will not be
raised. Nor do the Marxists seem to understand that some of the most fertile
repositories of wealth are not susceptible to reallocation and redistribution, such as inventiveness and know-how. A great deal of Western wealth (especially the means to
future Western wealth) resides not in material things but in the technological
brilliance and innovativeness embodied in so many of its best and most valuable
workers. That brilliance and innovativeness cannot be appropriated by the state
and reassigned and redistributed at will.
With
such Marxist errors Christianity cannot and does not agree. Because
Christianity and the world of hard extra-mental fact both have their origin in
God, Christianity and reality sing the same song, as it were. Because they do,
Christianity is not conform- able to the incomplete list of Marxist delusions
noted above. But because both Christianity and democratic capitalism are rooted
in the way things really are, they are compatible with one another. After all,
if one were to tune all the pianos in a piano warehouse to the same piano, all
the pianos in the warehouse would be in tune with one another.
Put
succinctly, capitalist values closely approximate Christian values, as George
Gilder has so ably demonstrated in his excellent Wealth and Poverty. First,
Gilder argues, capitalism is based upon giving. Successful capitalistic
enterprise consists of providing wisely conceived, conveniently distributed,
readily available, agreeably priced goods and services that others could not
have provided so well or so cheaply for themselves. That means that capitalism
does not reward selfishness. Instead, it forces upon the selfish a necessity to
seek and to serve the interests of others, to offer to them a product or a
service they desire at a price they think is fair. If a capitalist fails to
take into account the needs of others and the prices they are willing to pay to
meet those needs, that capitalist goes out of business. Capitalists work for
the consumer, not for themselves. They give the consumer what the consumer
wants, not what they themselves want. As Thomas Taylor correctly observed,
“virtually every person in a modern economy devotes his skills and energies to
a highly specialized activity that provides a product or service to be used by
someone else.”7 As a result, capitalists stay in business only as long as the
consumer permits them to do so. The marketplace is not the arena for unbridled
selfishness; it is the stage upon which we learn to consider others and their
needs. The market rewards those who serve and those who give, not those who do
not. Capitalist prosperity hinges not upon our selfishness, but upon our
successfully focusing upon, analyzing, and satisfying someone else’s needs. We
succeed in the marketplace only insofar as we advance the cause of our fellows
and invest our resources and our efforts in that advance. If you neglect your
neighbor’s needs; if you refuse to put your time, talent, and treasure to work
providing for his convenience; your enterprise comes to nothing. If you carefully
consider and then appropriately satisfy your neighbor’s needs you will enjoy
the fruit of your labors. Whatever else we may call this attention to meeting
the needs of others, it is not selfishness. The marketplace is a school for
virtue, not a subsidy for vice.
The
critics of capitalism do not understand this because they do not understand
either the market-wide beneficial effects of economic competition or the
inescapably civilizing effects of the marketplace. Nor do they understand that
after a freely entered market exchange both parties are better off,
otherwise no exchange would have taken place. Competition is a struggle for
excellence that results in better products at lower and lower prices to the
consumer. The marketplace tames those who compete there by requiring them to be
courteous to customers; to accommodate other people’s needs and desires before
their own; and to deal fairly and honestly with all the people with whom they
trade; or else to fail.
Second,
Gilder argues, faith is a capitalist virtue. In the market- place one finds no
guarantees. Investments sometimes fail. Try as you may, the entrepreneurial
gifts that you offer your neighbor might be rejected. As Gilder explains,
. . . there is no demand for new and unknown goods,
no demand for the unforeseeable fruits of innovation and genius . . . If a
product is new, it may create demand, perhaps over time. But the demand does
not already exist, except in the mind [and hopes] of the entrepreneur.8
Entrepreneurs,
in other words, walk by faith, not by sight. They learn to believe in things
not seen.
But
this is not the place to rehearse at length the case that Gilder himself has
made so convincingly and in greater detail elsewhere. Suffice it here to say that Gilder
has demonstrated that, like Christianity, democratic capitalism places a
premium not only upon such things as faith and giving, but also upon hard work,
strong traditional family ties and roles, creativity, and experience. Marxism
does not. Its refusal to do so raises the most fundamental question of all: Can
you ignore the moral laws of God or (what is the same) the laws of nature and
still prosper? The answer to that fundamental question, as the dismal history
of Marxism indicates, is no. Given the hard facts of nature and the immutable
God by whom that nature was established, one could easily believe that the
political and economic meltdown now underway in Marxist nations around the
world was inevitable. It ultimately can be no other way. As Dorothy L. Sayers
correctly observed, “There is only one real law — the law of the uni- verse; it
may be fulfilled by way of judgment or by the way of grace, but it must be
fulfilled one way or the other.”9
From
every indication now available to me, Karl Marx was wrong. The future does not
belong to the proletariat. It belongs to the free. Marxism is in retreat
worldwide because it ignores reality and because the reality it ignores is
resilient and will have its way.
But
because human beings tend to be relentlessly obtuse, error is resilient too. We
human beings hold to our errors sometimes with prodigious tenacity and often
with a ferocity to match. In the words of Malcolm Muggeridge,
[Some] minds are prepared to believe anything,
however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve
anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able
to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most
thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth can be
relied on to champion human freedom.10
Because
error is resilient, the free nations of the West must be circumspect and
deliberate in their continued self-defense. Christians must not be derelict in
their duty to preserve the manifold blessings of liberty and prosperity because
it remains to be seen whether or not a new strain of Marxist virus will breed
in the presently rotting corpse of Soviet tyranny. That new strain, if it
arises, will be more virulent and robust than any we have yet known. We must
not let that genie out of the bottle.
End Notes
1 Brian Griffiths, The Creation of Wealth: A
Christian’s Case for Capitalism (Downers Grove: IVP, 1984), pp. 11, 13.
2 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1976/1981),
p. 452.
3 Ludwig von Mises, Money, Method, and the
Market Process, edited by Richard M. Ebeling (Norwell: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1990), pp. 223, 221-222.
4 Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom (New
York: The John Day Company, 1943), pp. 5, 6.
5 Griffiths, ibid., p. 78.
6. John Chamberlain, The Roots of
Capitalism (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1959/1976), pp. 70, 71.
7 Thomas C. Taylor, An Introduction to Austrian
Economics (Auburn: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1980), p. 18.
8. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New
York: Bantam, 1981), pp. 45,49.
9 Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? and
other Essays in Popular Theology (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1947), p.
52.
10 Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a
Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 87.
