Capitalism isn’t a free ride. As described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, wealth carries obligations to the common good.
This isn’t a new concept. The whole story of Buddhism is of a man in mid-life who renounces the pursuit of wealth in favor of spirituality. Even Mohammed was a trader before he was a prophet. The idea is that you spend the first half of your life building wealth, recognize how shallow that is, and spend the back end doing for others.
Against that we have Nietzsche, for whom self-interest was the whole of the law. Against that we have Nietzsche’s acolyte, Ayn Rand, who brought him to America with badly-written novels that were thinly-disguised political screeds telling the poor to fuck off.
Today’s problem is that too many rich people are following Rand, and Nietzsche, while too few are following Smith. Too many believe that capitalism isn’t an economic theory but a political one, and that the only obligation of wealth is to rule.
Charles Dickens put this neatly in his book A Christmas Carol. There’s the Scrooge before the ghosts reach him. There’s the Scrooge after. They’re different men. While set in London, the story is more appropriate to Manchester, where in the mid-19th century the industrial revolution was letting owners turn workers into easily-exploited labor.
When Karl Marx was a boy, he took a hard look around. He saw people were starving all over the place, while others were painting the town, as Randy Newman wrote. Marxism wasn’t meant to create a new dictatorship. It was meant to control the excesses to which wealth was heir to.
This is playing out again, today. Most billionaires are nice people who give generously and care about their fellow man. But there are others who see wealth as a right to rule and had nothing to do with the wealth’s creation. Most of America’s media today is controlled by heirs, not by founders. Shari Redstone didn’t build CBSViacom, her father did. A.P. Sulzberger is the 5th generation of his family to run The New York Times. The combined wealth of the Walton siblings is greater than that of even Jeff Bezos. It’s Rebekah Mercer, not her father Robert, who co-founded Parler. It’s Julien’s son David Smith who runs Sinclair.
This is feudalism. This predates the dangers Smith wrote about. This is Louis XIV stuff. These are Louis XVI people.
Forget about Trump for a minute. Forget about the politicians who follow him. Focus on the money. Focus on where the money comes from. Focus on what that money is trying to do, saddle us with a ruling class of heirs. Focus on the heirs’ refusal to obey the first principle of capitalism, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.
