Z-man has apparently chosen to visit the epiphany of discovering that capitalism isn't God.
Well,... okay.
If that's news to anyone, there's no harm in the exercise.
If one is just seeking iconoclastic silliness, it's on the same level as the "Occupy" and Antifatards' antics, namely of attempting to burn the system down just to watch the bonfire.
That's on the mental level of dropping a hand grenade into an outhouse just to watch the $#!^ fly.
People without college degrees get that capitalism isn't everything in the universe, nor ever was.
If capitalism is your economic choice, well and good. None better has yet been found in human existence.
If capitalism is your theology, you will fall heir to the exact same mistake Marxism makes: that man, and his existence, is ultimately nothing but existential materialism.
This idea is no more earth-shattering a discovery than finding out things go better when a man rides a horse, instead of the other way around.
Adam Smith wasn't wrong, the trouble moves in when people try to use capitalistic "pursuit of happiness" to functionally only encompass material possessions and one's own pleasure.
You have to first take the Jeffersonian-Bible approach, and take out any thought that the best things in life aren't things.
This wasn't even original in 1947, when Fred tells Doris that "life's lovely intangibles" are the only things that are worthwhile.
It wasn't even news when Charles Dickens penned the same lesson in A Christmas Carol over 100 years before that, in 1843.
Capitalism per se isn't bad, nor even misguided.
And money isn't the root of all evil.
"The love of money is the root of all evil." is the proper quote.
That quote traces to circa 60 A.D., and an earlier version on the same subject traces to around 31 A.D.
You can keep walking it back until you get to around 1400 B.C. with little change in the moral of the story.
People who know the difference between being well, versus just being well-off, never have any problem with capitalism, kept in its pen.
Capitalism is very like a farmer's pig in that regard.
Tended within bounds, it is an endless source of bacon.
Turned loose to roam wild, it becomes a scourge of feral hogs, ravaging everything, and destroying the very farm that gave it birth.
Figuring that out isn't "rejecting modernity", because the mistake isn't anything like modern.
It may have a new mask, but it's an old, old tale.
It's rejecting a lie that's as old as time.
There's a reason greed was named as one of the seven deadly sins.
Amen
ReplyDeleteVery well stated.
ReplyDeleteSomething nobody likes to talk about is that with all freedom comes responsibility. Capitalism works exceptionally well in a "good and moral people" because they accept responsibility. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system, but it isn't a moral system. Any economic system is amoral by itself.
John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." It applies to capitalism as well.