Capitalism and Morality?

An old friend sent me the following recently and I thought I'd share it and my response. Oh, and I hereby apologize to all my adoring readers (okay, both of you) for my protracted silence. That's another story which, courage permitting, I'll tell some other time.

Anyway:

"To exist in bondage and poverty is the natural state of man throughout history. The Founding Fathers of the United States managed to change this. But now the basic problem is lack of understanding of where the freedom and then the wealth (the wealth was made possible by the freedom) came from. It came from Capitalism. However most people in the West, including unfortunately most businessmen, do not understand the moral basis of capitalism – they know it is the most productive social system yet devised but they go along with the notion that it is selfish and evil. Once you cede the high moral ground on any issue you’ve lost and it’s only a matter of time before they destroy you.

Public servants see themselves as protecting the innocent masses from the big bad businessmen (including all property owners) and when they have the businessmen more or less agreeing with them (Ayn Rand’s “the sanction of the victim”) then all hope is lost. If people understood the true moral basis of freedom (that everyone owns their own life and therefore the product of their effort) and that the government’s only task is to protect this freedom, we may have a chance. But can you see this sort of education happening in our schools? No chance. What’s next? I don’t know."


I don't know, ----. I think your friend's arguments are somewhat fractured here, but I'm not anxious to insult him. Is bondage and poverty the "natural" state of man, or the historic? Did the Founding Fathers change this via capitalism or democracy? (It's critical to note that the former is an economic, not social, system, though it has obvious social ramifications, while the later is the system of governance that guarantees our God-given freedoms).

Is he suggesting that capitalism as practiced by vast multi-national corporate conglomerates unfailingly occupies the moral high-ground to the betterment of all mankind? I'd suggest that the events of Autumn, 2008, convincingly refute that notion, and that the behavior of the worst offenders continues to do so. As Alan Greenspan, in something of a daze, was forced to admit before Congress that fall, the market nearly "corrected" itself, and us, into a global depression. What a deal: capitalism thriving through the privatization of gain and the socialization of risk. Show me the morality.

I could prattle on for hours about the abuses of corporate capitalism and the case(s) for regulation, there being no lack of examples (Halliburton, Monsanto, big oil, big whatever spring to mind), but I doubt I'd sway anyone who fundamentally hates the idea of government. Or anyone who conflates morality with an economic system. I like government, as do all the putative government-haters currently in or running for office. And I absolutely do feel that it is a legitimate role of government to protect its populace from abuse at the hands of concentrated power - the underlying premise of representative democracy. And I think that anyone who seriously believes our freedoms are best protected by corporate CEOs, investment bankers, hedge-fund managers and portfolio managers is profoundly disconnected from contemporary reality.

I may be on the losing side here. The Supreme Court, in perhaps the most egregious example of judicial activism in its history, recently conferred upon corporations the status of citizenship. Lovely. A corporation with majority Chinese ownership is now enabled to influence American elections with every penny in it's bank account. Ah, freedom!