From an op-ed authored by one Rod Dreher in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News:
What’s the greatest challenge facing American conservatives today? Liberalism? Don’t I wish. That would be relatively easy to defeat. No, it’s capitalism.
Mercifully, he’s not advocating communism. He’s merely happens to be an idiot who has just enough knowledge of economics and a sturdy belief in social conservative dogma to start spouting ridiculously dangerous ideas. Because excerpts wouldn’t have done it justice, here’s the entire article:
You read that right. Conservatives have to come to terms with the fact that capitalism, in its current form, undermines not only the virtues necessary to the kind of society conservatives claim to want, but ultimately risks subverting itself.
Capitalism is an ingenious system for increasing material prosperity. It succeeded historically because the free market is the most rational device for meeting human wants and needs. It also thrived because it rewarded creativity and industriousness, and encouraged both qualities. And the most prosperous people under capitalism tended to be those who understood the value of self-denial and delayed gratification.
Today, however, capitalism is defined not by a producer mentality but by a consumer ethos. The prosperity we see is in some respects a mirage, purchased with a credit card. According to U.S. government statistics, the personal savings rate recently dipped into negative territory for the first time since 1933. Consumers are buying more and more stuff we can’t afford. When bills come due, the whole pyramid scheme stands to collapse.
Our consumerist economy depends on people’s inability to discipline their consumption. The best consumer sees no reason why he shouldn’t have what he wants, right now. The best consumer, in other words, exists in a perpetual state of childishness.
In his new book, Consumed, political scientist Benjamin Barber writes that ours is the first society that acts as if its survival depends on keeping maturity – which involves learning to master one’s impulses – at bay. There is little in American political, religious, social or economic life that prizes restraint and sacrifice for a higher purpose.
“This strategy makes good commercial sense,” writes Mr. Barber, because of the market’s need “to sell unnecessary goods to people whose adult judgment and tastes are obstacles.”
Better yet for capitalists, cultivate a market among people who have no adult judgment and taste to overcome: children themselves. James McNeal, a Texas A&M marketing professor, has written: “Brand marketing must begin with children. Even if a child does not buy the product and will not for many years … the marketing must begin in childhood.”
Mr. McNeal’s perverse ideas are the enemy of the family. If marketers train children to think of themselves chiefly in terms of consumer wants, they are teaching them to be faithful not to what their parents teach them but to their individual desires – prisoners of their own cravings.
So what? Shopping isn’t bad in principle, and besides, if people want to behave as shopaholics, it’s a free country, right? Of course. But as Mr. Barber warns, private choices have public consequences. If the credit bubble bursts, it’s going to take down the good with the bad, the prudent with the spendthrift. More profoundly, adopting the consumerist mentality – which defines liberty only as individual choice, without respect to what is chosen – makes it difficult to inculcate a sense of obligation to any traditions or ideals higher than serving the autonomous self and its desires.
Democracy requires virtue. So does a healthy capitalism. A nation that cannot govern its own appetites will, in time, be unable to govern itself. An economy that divorces economic activity from the restraining virtues that make for good stewardship will implode.
We conservatives wail over the late, unlamented Republican Congress’ deficit spending. Yet the truth is that any politician who told voters to do more with less – that is, to conserve for the sake of a higher good – would be punished at the polls.
President Bush is often derided for having responded to the Sept. 11 attacks by urging the American people to go shopping. But he faithfully represents the ignoble spirit of the consumer capitalist age, in which the public demands, in Mr. Barber’s telling, “war without conscription, idealism without taxation, morality without sacrifice.”
Socialism is not the answer. But we can’t pretend that our prosperity does not present us with serious civic problems. Consumer capitalism contains within its unfolding dynamic the seeds of its own destruction, to say nothing of the way it chews up traditional loyalties to faith, family, community and place.
We don’t talk about this much in American politics, especially not on the right, where we’ve been supposedly waging a culture war for the traditional values cause for some time now. But we’re starting to: The American Conservative, which excerpted Mr. Barber’s book as a recent cover story, is fast becoming the most interesting political magazine on the right because it recognizes a simple but radical truth: When it comes to defending the things traditional conservatives cherish, big business is as much a threat as big government.
So here’s the central problem. Actually, much of what he says has a basis in reality; it’s simply his interpretation of the causes and effects of the crisis befalling our economy. Our savings rate is, indeed, negative for the first time since the depths of the Great Depression. Americans are indeed spending beyond their means at unseen levels (notably, following the example of their government), creating an ever-deeper trade deficit to fund it, and will eventually see its “credit bubble” popped violently.
Why?
It’s not marketing, despite the straw man quote from a solitary marketing professor that supposedly is reflective of all corporations on the face of the earth. It’s not the nature of capitalism, which has been one of the two central building blocks of the nation since its founding (the other being our political and civil liberties — is it any wonder that this country is going in the wrong direction with both being so thoroughly eroded?). It’s not a lack of virtue, considering the less inhibited nations that social conservatives fear we are tending toward (Holland, Sweden, et al) have much higher savings rates, lower inflation levels, and (at least in the short run) higher economic growth rates.
Why?
Because of ourselves. Ultimately, Mr. Dreher is suggesting that the government has to stop us from following the choices that we willfully, repeatedly make of our own free will. And yes, it will ultimately destroy us. But there is no way to remove what the author believes is the downside of capitalism without dismantling the system altogether. Capitalism, as the author points out, has served us quite well. It is, by a ridiculously wide margin, the best economic system in existence to govern the distribution of scarce economic resources. It is intrinsically a raw phenomenon; perhaps its hallmark is what Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” the replacement of aging means of production with newer, more efficient ones. Some individuals’ lives are ruined in the process, but the welfare of society increases as a result.
We have become accustomed to an unnaturally high rate of consumption growth generated by a series of exogenous shocks that artificially increased the rate of economic growth — first the rapid growth after the destruction of
physical capital in World War II, then the rapid growth from the wholesale entry of women into the workforce, then the rapid growth from the increases in productivity generated by exponential increases in computing power and connectivity. Without a new shock to the system, our current rates of spending growth will continue to outpace our income. Rampant consumerism is not at fault, as it has always been with us and was derided at least as far back as the writings of Karl Marx. If we, as a society, are too dumb to save ourselves, then our government should allow our own destruction. This is a republic, after all. We get the government, and fate, that we deserve.
The worst part of this column is his derision of the “consumerist mentality — which defines liberty only as individual choice, without regard to what is chosen.” That’s exactly what liberty is! Ultimately, the First Amendment is there to protect our freedom of all expression, as far as it is not dangerous to others, regardless of what we are expressing. There is no need to defend popular points of view because they’re, well, popular. Civil liberties are there to protect the rebellious, extreme, and delusional. If we only have the right to believe things that others dictate are morally correct, then we have no rights at all.
