NR GREER: Capitalist activism is the way to go
CAPITALISM has been back in the dock recently with all the national party leaders making calls for those nasty wealth-creating employers to have a cuddly make over.
Red Ed Miliband kicked it off with an attack on what he called “predatory capitalism” and with calls for “moral capitalism, Nick Clegg wants a John Lewis society, (though obviously not in Northern Ireland where we are not allowed to have a branch of the employee owned department store). Meanwhile Dave Cameron is riffing on a theme of social responsibility.
It seems somewhat unfair to tar all business owners with the small brush as is rightly being used to smear muck all over the banksters, and credit is due to the Labour leader for at least making a distinction between producers and predators, but asking capitalism to be moral is in many ways as realistic as asking water if it might consider being a little less wet.
Capitalism has no morality, it is neither a force for good, nor an inherently immoral activity; it is simply an economic mechanism, and a highly effective one. It is the best system that there is for creating wealth and meeting people’s needs and wants.
Capitalism has delivered us both Chateau Lafite and Irn Bru; easyJet and Learjet; Swan Lake and Katie Price. It has given us Bernie Madoff and Anita Roddick.
Like justice capitalism is blind. Left unchecked capitalism will usually succumb to the human frailties of greed and lead to unsustainable inequalities. This is the central plank of revolutionary Marxism, that preaches that capitalism will always lead to cruelty and unfairness and so sow the seeds of revolution.
Unfortunately unchecked socialism is an even worse outcome than rampant capitalism. History has, however, shown that whenever socialism has taken hold the results are poverty and the brutality of the Gulag.
However, capitalism tamed by democracy has consistently produced the best results for the greatest number of people.
Broadly the western capitalist world has succeeded by switching between right wing governments that stick their noses out and allow wealth to be created, until the inequalities become evident and the electorate invites a left wing government in to spread the wealth about. Once the left wing has spent all the money the cycle starts over again.
But things have been allowed to get a bit out of synch of late. The Conservative government of the Eighties let the banking market rip; it worked spectacularly well, creating unimagined amounts of wealth for the UK, which masked the fact that we were producing very little world products. Unfortunately the last Labour government failed to trim back this excess. Instead of regulating the bankers, Tony and Gordon sucked up to them. They regulated the life out of what Ed Miliband now calls the producers while forming a corporatist Faustian pact that he now refers to as the predators. Instead of using taxes to pump prime industrial growth, they borrowed money to expand the state.
The job for the current government is to move capital, financial and human, out of the financial sector and back into the manufacturing sector, a particularly difficult task given that there is so little spare cash lying about to ease the transition. And while it might be very tempting to put some manners on the bankers, there is no immediate answer as to how to replace the jobs and income that they provide.
So if the Occupy crowd really want to stick it to the bankers, they should stop sitting around in tents mouthing platitudes, and instead become capitalist activists, start a business, innovate, create jobs and pay taxes because only when there is a healthy alternative business sector will it be possible to truly give the Fred Goodwins of this world the option of behaving properly or a one way ticket to Zurich.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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