ANYTHING WRONG WITH CAPITALISM?

ANYTHING WRONG WITH CAPITALISM?

We may ask, then, what specifically is wrong with our capitalistic system of private enterprise?

What is wrong with production or with trying to improve our standard of living?

What is wrong with a profit, or with private ownership of capital, or with competition?

Is this not the true American way of life?

Nothing is necessarily wrong with these values. There are certainly worse motives than the profit motive. A refugee from communism is reported to have observed: "What a delight to be in the United States where things are produced and sold with such a nice clean motive as making a profit."

I am not an economist, and it is beyond the scope of this article to attempt a revision of our economic theory. I am tempted, however, to make a couple of observations about these traditional economic concepts: For example, the concept of economic man as being motivated by self-interest not only is outmoded by the best current facts of the social sciences, but also fails to appeal to the true nobility of spirit of which we are capable.

The concept of the free and competitive market is a far cry from the highly controlled and regulated economy in which business must operate today. General Motors did not appear to want to put Chrysler out of business, and apparently the union also decided to take the heat off Chrysler rather than to press its economic advantage to the logical conclusion.

The assumption that everyone is out to destroy his competitors does not explain the sharing of technology through trade associations and journals. No, we also have tremendous capacity for cooperation when challenged by larger visions. We are daily denying the Darwinian notion of the "survival of the fittest" which, incidentally, William Graham Sumner, one of the nineteenth-century apologists for our economic system, used for justifying unbridled self-interest and competition.

Certainly the traditional concept of private ownership of capital does not quite correspond to the realities of today's control of large blocks of capital by insurance companies and trusteed funds.

The notion of individual security through the accumulation of savings has largely given way to the collectivist means of group insurance, company annuities, and Social Security.

The concept that all profits belong to the stockholders is no longer enthusiastically supported by either the government or the unions since both are claiming an increasing cut.

And so, while we may argue that the system of private enterprise is self-regulatory and therefore offers maximum individual freedom, the simple, cold fact is that it is in ever-increasing degree a managed or controlled economy-partly at the insistence of the voters, but largely as the result of the inevitable economic pressures and the continued trend toward bigness.

Some call this globalism and some imperialism.

Anyone who became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford was educated one year in their own discipline and one year in Cecil John Rhodes concept of imperialism.  Two thirds of the third world Rhodes Scholars are now in charge of their countries financial system.

Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of these changes in our system of enterprise, the changes have been considerable, and I doubt that classical economic theory can be used as an adequate rationale of its virtues.

I am therefore not particularly optimistic about the efficacy of the current campaign to have businessmen "save the private enterprise system and the American way of life" by engaging in wholesale economic education.

What is wrong is more a matter of goals and purposes-of our assumptions about what we are trying to do and how we can dignify and improve ourselves in the doing.

There is nothing wrong with production, but we should ask ourselves: "Production for what?" Do we use people for production or production for people? How can production be justified if it destroys personality and human values both in the process of its manufacture and by its end use?

Clarence B. Randall of Inland Steel in his book, A Creed for Free Enterprise, says: “We have come to worship production as an end in itself, which of course it is not. It is precisely there that the honest critic of our way of life makes his attack and finds us vulnerable. Surely there must be for each person some ultimate value, some purpose, some mode of self-expression that makes the experience we call life richer and deepens.”

So far, so good, Mr. Randall-

But now notice how he visualizes industry making its contribution to this worthy objective: To produce more and more with less and less effort is merely treading water unless we thereby release time and energy for the cultivation of the mind and the spirit and for the achievement of those ends for which Providence placed us on this earth.

Perhaps we should ask; what is the really important difference between what was the Russian system of communism- that now the rules China and the Western economic system?

Both worship production and are determined to produce more efficiently, and do. Both worship science. Both have tremendously improved the standard of living of their people. Both share the wealth. Both develop considerable loyalties for their system.

True, in China capital is controlled by the state while in the West it is theoretically controlled by individuals, although in actual practice, through absentee ownership, it is controlled to a considerable extent by central planning agencies and bureaus, both public and private.

No, the real difference is in the philosophy about people and how they may be used as means to ends. It is a difference in the assumptions made about the origin of rights-whether the individual is endowed with rights by his Creator as Thomas Jefferson believed or yields these only voluntarily to civil authority designated by him, or whether rights originate in force and in the will of the government.

Is God a myth, or is He the final and absolute judge to whom we are ultimately responsible?

Are all standards of conduct merely man-made and relative, or absolute and eternal?

Is man a meaningless happenstance of protoplasm, or is he a divine creation with a purpose, with potential for improvement, and with a special destiny in the over-all scheme of things?

Mr. Martin Chekel, a noted international businessman and author of the thought provoking “Managing America” six book series and the retrospective eight book series “The Diary of American Foreign Policy 1938 – 1945” that laid the foundation for US foreign policy the past seventy-four years.