A Few Shiny Pebbles

I want to examine the same basic excerpt that I did in my last Post on Senator Clinton’s May 29th speech, “Modern Progressive Vision: Shared Prosperity”, but from another angle. Sen. Clinton said [emphasis mine]:

Today I want to focus on how we ensure both strong economic growth and economic fairness. Now, we have seen for more than a century that fairness doesn't just happen. It requires the right government policies. And no one should be surprised, human nature being what it is, people will go as far as they possibly can get away with. The genius of the American economic in the 20th century was that it helped to counter that tendency for people to push as far as their own interests would take them so that we created a leveler playing field that benefited everyone. [. . .] [The Bush] administration's theory about how we should manage our economy: leave it all up to the individual. [. . .] They call it the ownership society. But it's really the "on your own" society. [. . .] It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an "on your own" society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a "we're all in it together" society.

Now, one of the Conservative Cat’s wonderful aphorisms is [emphasis mine]:

The earth-shattering import of [Adam Smith’s] The Wealth of Nations was not its theory of economics, but instead the principle that a nation benefits from the freedom and self-interest of its citizens. When you oppose capitalism, you are opposing the right of people to make their own choices.

Ferdy, the Conservative Cat, clearly sides with the individualistic ownership society, as do I. I think we should cheer the knowledge that the self-interest of people making their own choices causes “people to push as far as their own interests [will] take them”. And I think that “the right of people to make their own choices” sounds to me like individual responsibility, the opposite of “shared responsibility”.

First, we should note that Senator Clinton, and those in positions of power throughout the world and throughout time, have always been able to push their own self-interest as far as they could go. People in power do not value “level playing fields” for their own pathways through the world. And if the definition of the ownership of property is the ability to use it for one’s self-interest, then in any country where there is “no private property”, everything is actually the private property of the leaders of the country, just as at one time all the property in some countries was owned by the monarch. In such countries, other people may be said to own some of it, but since the final decision on what is done with something comes from the top, it is the people at the top that own it.

The establishment of true private property and the creation of wealth are two of the most powerful tools of humankind. Throughout time, those in power have always had access to private property for their own self-interest, and to the creation of personal wealth. Whatever the form of the “shared responsibility”, the “level playing field”, and the establishment of “fairness”, they are all meant to exist in a different realm from those in the power structure. Whatever else those in the power structure can claim, it is not "we're all in it together".

Second, for those outside the leadership group, without the opportunities that Capitalism brings most of the people throughout history have worked hard for the little they had, spent most of their life hungry and thirsty, and had little chance of bettering their position. There was no known route to take to change impotent self-interest to achievement, to change poverty to owned assets, to build a better life for yourself and for those you care about. Historically, and even now in most parts of the world, it is difficult or impossible for someone not in a position of power to act beyond a certain basic level of existence. Without freedom and capitalism, self-interest is blocked in too many directions.

I need to point out that when I use the term “self-interest” here, I know I am speaking of a term that carries with it a load of emotional baggage. For instance, Collectivists view private property not as the ability to use something for your own purposes, but as a way to prevent others from using that same thing. To a collectivist, if I own a piece of land on which I want to create an herbal garden, I am preventing you from forcing me to grow indigenous flora or, perhaps, cacti on that piece of land. So I must state that I am using “self-interest” here in the positive, individualistic sense—as in the pursuit of happiness.

A society of involuntarilyshared responsibility ties you into the whim of people you cannot control. It makes you always have to take into consideration someone who is not part of your own self-interest. Involuntarilyshared responsibility removes a wide range of things you can do in your own self-interest, and adds a whole range of harm that can be done to you by others within the accepted rules of society. Involuntarilyhared responsibility can even enslave you, by forcing you to spend your time in ways against your own self-interest.

However, to live in a society that gives you the most range for doing good for yourself or those you care about is and has been the goal, the dream, of most of humankind. You need to find a way to secure a good for yourself or your family. Self-interest and choice are the impetus for Freedom. Freedom is about maximizing the scope and range of the good you can do in your own self-interest. Capitalism is the method to make use of the scope and range freedom gives you.

Capitalism is the essential tool of Freedom.

Third, even Capitalism without Freedom gives some promise to people. An excellent example about what happens then is in the book The Other Path, were Hernando De Soto writes about Peru—but what he has to say speaks just as well for much of the world itself. He says that there are three kinds of quasi-countries overlapping each other within Peru’s borders. The first is composed of the mercantilist, feudal, and tribal elements of the primary economy that haunts them from the past. The second is the part of the economy that is changing because of terrorist pressures, because of Maoist guerrilla terrorists called the Shining Path.

The third quasi-country within the nation—the one De Soto believes brings the hope for the future, the one he calls “The Other Path”—is the economic synergy of the groups that form the illegal black-market along with its attendant quasi-legal “grey” areas of private enterprise that has infiltrated the feudal and socialist forms of the legal government of the nation. This Other Path is Capitalistic, free market economics, entrepreneurial, vibrant, and vigorous. It controls a huge amount of the functional economy. These illegal and quasi-legal capitalist entrepreneurs are the economic blood and sinews of the nations that are emerging from Collectivism. This makes Peru a microcosm of the world, which also is dealing with the past, the collectivists, terrorists, and the private enterprise that is so often hidden.

In the Foreword to the book, Mario Vargas Llosa indicates that this Other Path. . .

. . . shows us what might be hoped for if all that productive energy could be put into practice legally in an authentic market economy in a government which, instead of harassing the black-marketeers, would protect and stimulate them

There is a passage in Czeslaw Milosz’s book, The Captive Mind, (p. 192-193) that capture’s the essence of this fever in Human Beings that makes them strive to do better for themselves. Milosz writes of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, after the Communist take-over, and of the small tradespeople who secretly, desperately, kept on, despite the continued efforts of the police to force them into collectivism:

Hardly is one clandestine workshop or store liquidated in one neighborhood or city than another springs up elsewhere. Restaurants hide behind a sliding wall of a private house; shoemakers and tailors work at home for their friends. In fact, everything that comes under the heading of speculation sprouts up again and again. . . . . A worker’s wife goes to a nearby town, buys needles and thread, brings them back and sells them: the germ of capitalism. The worker himself of a free afternoon mends a broken bathroom pipe for a friend who has waited months for the state to send him a repair man. In return, he gets a little money, enough to buy himself a shirt: a rebirth of capitalism

Milosz points out that the Communist powers knew that it was essential that they wipe out these secret capitalists. He said:

If these manifestations of human enterprise were not wiped out it is easy to guess what they would lead to. A worker would set up a plumbing repairs shop. His neighbor, who secretly sells alcohol to people who want to drink in relative privacy, would open a cafe’. . . . . They would gradually expand their businesses, and the lower middle class would reappear. Introduce freedom of the press and of assembly, and publications catering to this clientele would spring up like mushrooms after the rain. And there would be . . . a political force.

At this moment, throughout the world, even in the United States, there are Collectivists who are intent on destroying the hope that Capitalism brings, on destroying the individual by forcing people into groups, on rooting out the habits of Freedom, on taking away the individual’s self-interest. These Collectivists know that the only way to control people is to keep them in groups, dependent and afraid, to prevent them from learning how to prosper by themselves or carrying out any individual self-interested action. Some of these Collectivists call themselves "Progressives".

In too much of the world, the only people allowed to push or fulfill their self-interest is the leadership and their privileged favorites. Everyone else has to share what little there is left.

We can’t let this happen to America.

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