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.
