debunking two myths on capitali

7/27/2019 Debunking Two Myths on Capitali

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Debunking Two Myths on Capitalismby: Clark Carlton (*)

Source: http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/carlton/my_two_cents_on_capitalism

(*) Clark Carlton was reared as a Southern Baptist in middle Tennessee. He was enrolled as aRaymond Brian Brown Memorial Scholar at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary inWake Forest, NC when he converted to the Orthodox Church.

Clark earned his B.A. in philosophy from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, TN andand M.Div. from St Vladimirs Orthodox Theological Seminary in NY, where he studied underthe renowned church historian, Fr John Meyendorff. He also holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in EarlyChristian Studies from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

At present, Clark is assistant professor of philosophy at Tennessee Tech University, where he

teaches the history of philosophy as well as philosophy of religion and logic. He writes on anumber of subjects and has had articles published in the Journal of Christian Bioethics, StVladimirs Theological Quarterly, and the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Clark is also the author of The Faith series from Regina Orthodox Press: The Faith:Understanding Orthodox Christianity; The Way: What Every Protestant Should Know about theOrthodox Church; The Truth: What every Roman Catholic Should Know about the OrthodoxChurch; and The Life: The Orthodox Doctrine of Salvation.

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"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, theyshall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you bewilling and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land."

Hello, and welcome once again to Faith and Philosophy. Todays topic is My Two Cents onCapitalism. Im going to return to the topic of theological language in future podcasts, andwhen I do, I want to focus specifically on the Scriptures and how we are to read them.

But today I want to take a little detour. Ive been catching up on various podcasts, here onAFR, recently. And I was intrigued by a series of podcasts on capitalism. So while the topic isfresh in my mind, I wanted to throw in my two cents.

What follows is not intended to be a refutation of any one thing, said by any one person.Rather my comments are aimed more at clarifying the terms and issues that have been raised.The one criticism I will make of the previous discussions is that there was a lack of historicalcontext. Trying to define terms abstractly, without reference to their historical development,will inevitably lead to distortions.

Basically, I want to explode two myths surrounding capitalism, hence my two cents. The firstmyth is that capitalism depends on private property and free markets. The second is thatprogressivism and socialism are real alternatives to capitalism.

Lets start with the first myth, and this is sure to raise a few hackles. Historically capitalismhas proven to be the enemy of private property, not its champion. Yes, yes I know. We haveall heard people define capitalism as the private ownership of property, over against


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socialism which is the public ownership of capital.

But that definition is both misleading and misserving. People owned private property formillennia prior to the onset of capitalism. The Roman recognized private ownership, as didthe Greeks and the Jews. Private property is not a modern invention. Indeed, classicalrepublicanism depended on the private ownership of property and, therefore, on the virtuesof the property holding citizen class.

Karl Marx welcomed and praised capitalism. I bet you didnt hear that in government schools.But you say, Marx wanted to eliminate all private property. And so he did. But he sawcapitalism as a necessary stage in the socioeconomic development of mankindadevelopment which he believed was leading inexorably toward a communist utopia.

In other words, capitalism is essential to the concentration of property in the hands of a few.This does two things from the communist perspective. It accentuates socioeconomicinequalities to the point where the proletariat will rise up in revolution, and it makes thetransition to communism easier because so few have property in the first place.

Moreover, capitalism thrives only in controlled markets, not free markets. Some of theprevious discussion focused on laissez-faire capitalism. Lets get one thing clear. There is nosuch thing. Never has been. Never will. Laissez-faire capitalism is a libertarian fantasy, andlibertarians have been correctly described as utopians of the right.

Capitalism, as it developed historically, is not rooted in the exchange of the free market, butin the manipulation of the market by governments for the benefits of capitalistsor at least,some capitalists.

First of all, capitalism can only exist where the economy has been monetized. It would beimpossible in a barter economy. Now a monetized economy necessitates a monetary system

of some sort, which will eventually require a banking system and, just as important, somesort of political or governmental backing for the money.

From the very beginning, capitalists relied on governments to benefit them through monetarytax and trade policies. Capitalism and mercantilism go hand in hand. The robber barons ofthe gilded age did not get filthy rich by manipulating free markets. They got rich thanks tofederal monetary policy, tax policy, public spending on things like railroads, and high tariffsthat protected them from free competition.

Frankly, it is impossible to get as rich as the Vanderbilts or Rockefellers or even the Bill Gatesor Warren Buffetts of the world without massive government manipulation of the marketsespecially through monetary and tax policy. Some people get rich because of thesemanipulations. Others suffer loss. It has nothing to do with survival of the fittest. It has to dowith who you know and how well you can manipulate the system in your own favor.

This brings me to the second mythnamely that progressivism and socialism offer genuinealternatives to capitalism. If capitalism really were concerned with private property and freemarkets, they would be an alternative. But as capitalism actually promotes the concentrationof wealth and the socialization of the riskier aspects of the economy, progressivism andsocialism turn out to be just a different side of the same corrupt economic system.

Ive often said that evangelicals constitute the single dumbest voting block in the U.S.,because they can almost always be counted on to vote against their own long-term interest

just as long as a politician says something nice about Jesus and pretends to oppose abortion.Second to evangelicals, however, I would have to rate self-professed progressives, who reallybelieve that because they support things like government regulation and universal health careinsurance that they are standing up to the corporate elites in the name of the little man. Utter


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and complete horse manure.

Let me give you one example. This year the Congress gave the FDA the ability to regulatetobaccoa victory for consumers and health advocates over big, bad tobacco companies,right? Well, not quite. What turned the tide is when the big companies dropped theiropposition to the bill. They reasoned that the new regulations would give them a competitiveadvantage over smaller tobacco companies, since the inevitable FDA regulations would be

more onerous for small producers.

Indeed, in most cases, government regulation of industry tends to benefit large corporationsand place greater burdens on small companies. All of this can be seen if we look at thehistory of the United States. Contrary to our school book mythology, the first settlers werenot all religious minorities looking for freedom.

Both the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company were for-profit corporationswith stockholders back in England, who were expecting a handsome return on theirinvestments. From the very beginning, however, they were tensions between the colonists andtheir corporate overlords. What most people dont realize is that a good deal of the

parliamentary legislation, of which the colonists complained so bitterly, was passed at thebehest of and for the explicit benefit of the East India Company.

By the end of the 18th century, the East India Company had become so rich and powerfulithad its own army and navy at one pointit pretty much had Parliament and the Crownbought and paid for. Thus when the colonists complained of tyranny, it was really corporatetyranny, though manifest through the acts of a puppet Parliament.

When the colonists achieved independence, two distinct paths lay before them. Jeffersonwanted a complete break with the old mercantilist, capitalist system. He envisioned a republicof smaller republics, based on widespread ownership of farm property and small businesses.

He warned of dire consequences if the stockjobbers and bankers ever got the upper hand. Hebelieved that for property rights and freedom to be preserved, political power must be asdecentralized as possible.

On the other side of the debate was Alexander Hamilton. He wanted to reproduce Englishmercantilism on this side of the Atlantic and to beat the English at their own game. Heenvisioned the United States as an economic and military juggernaut. To accomplish thishowever, both political power and financial capital would have to be concentrated.

For the first half of the 19th century, the Jeffersonians held the Hamiltonians at bay, for themost part. But in 1860, all of that changed. The election of Abraham Lincoln placed the U.S.firmly on the path toward becoming a mercantilist empire, and weve been paying the pricefor this ever since.

Let me explode one more myth here. The Republican Party is not now and has never been aconservative party. It was founded in the 1850s and remains to this day a coalition ofcorporate elites and social progressives. The Republican program of a national bank, publiclyfunded internal improvements, and high protective tariffs created not only unprecedentedwealth in this country; it also created unprecedented corruptionboth private andgovernmental.

The progressive reforms of the first part of the 20th century were not a repudiation ofmercantilist capitalism, merely a retrenchment along different lines. Government regulation

became the price for government largesse. Lets not forget that Republican Teddy Rooseveltwas one of the founders of the Progressive Party.

Up until 1932, the Democratic Party was still the more conservative of the two parties, but


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that changed with the election of F.D.R., whose family, let us not forget, had been Republican.Take a look at the Democratic platform of 1932. It is almost the mirror opposite of whatF.D.R. actually did in office. The election of 1932 was one of the great swindles of all time.

All of this explains, by the way, why President Obamas actual policies differ little from thoseof George Bush. Obama supported the bailout plan before taking office, and hisadministration has continued the same disastrous policies of bailing out the banks and

debasing the dollars in the bank accounts of people who actually have to work for a living.Nothing has changed.

To return to a question raised by earlier podcasts, is capitalism compatible with OrthodoxChristianity? Well, the answer is no. But progressivism does not offer a real alternative.Capitalism is a modernist economic system and progressivism is a modernist palliativenotan alternative.

The only real alternative to capitalism is something along the lines of what Jeffersonenvisioned. This is similar to the vision of the Catholic distributivists, such as Belloc andChesterton, and to the third way of the Protestant economist Wilhelm Rpke. The foundation

of such a system is widespread property ownership and decentralized government.

I should point out here that the Greek word economia means household management. WallStreet is not the economy. The economy is how you provide for yourself and your family andhow you treat your neighbors in the process. Its becoming increasingly difficult, however, toprovide for ourselves when our savings are devalued by government policies and our smallfarms and businesses are regulated within an inch of their lives to the advantage of bigcorporations.

Id like to conclude with some comments concerning the Protestant, Wilhelm Rpke. Theseare made by Ralph Ansel in a very good article he wrote:

For a Protestant who holds the situation created by the Reformation to be one of the greatestcalamities in history, he must have difficulty finding his religious home either incontemporary Protestantism, which in its disruption and lack of orientation is worse than everbefore, or in contemporary post-Reformation Catholicism. All he can do is to reassemble, inhimself, the essential elements of pre-Reformation, undivided Christianity. And in this, I thinkI am one of a company of men whose goodwill, at least, is beyond dispute.

We know of course that undivided Christianity does not need to be, indeed cannot be,reassembled because it already exists within the Orthodox Church. But this passage is areminder that the solution to modern mans economic dilemmas lie not in modernism, but inthe faith and life once delivered to the Saints.

Orthodoxy, alone, is capable of offering not only a critique of modernity, but of pointing usto real solutions. We cannot bear the witness to the truth that the world needs, however, aslong as we continue to try to make peace with political and economic systems that, by theirvery nature, undermine the faith we hold and the life we endeavor to lead.

And now may our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, through the intercessions of St.Innocent of Alaska and of the Blessed Elder Sophrony Sakharov, have mercy upon us all andgrant us a rich entrance into His eternal Kingdom.

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