The Moral Imperative of Capitalism

It is fashionable, and has been from time immemorial, to condemn the free market as anti-Christian, as some intrinsically greedy and savage process whereupon the rich get richer, and hopefully buy better hair pieces, and the poor get poorer, and hopefully do not buy further copies of the NIV.

Even the more frolicsome princes of our own Roman Catholic faith, given their slightly confused ideologies borne of too much tropical time in the economic netherregions of the planet, seem to not quite get that for human dignity to be regnant there must be work. And for there to be work somebody has to risk capital to start the venture and see it through to profit and thus more employment.

As Adam Smith put it in 1776, the invisible hand of the market is objective and innately fair and, as opposed to government, it does not pick winners and losers but relies on individual needs, the allure of the product, and personal taste to perform the task.

For when you purchase an item at Saks or Nordstrom you’re exercising a free choice. That choice could go a lot of ways, as, if you’re not inclined to the expensively pretentious as I am, you can go down the road and find close to the same thing at Walmart or Macy’s for a much lower price. Though, I’d visit the elegant restrooms at Saks before I left for Walmart.

You win by purchasing the item of your choice, the store wins by the profit, the employee wins by their continued job and possible advancement, and the shareholder, if it’s a public company, wins by a good return on their investment.

That job held by the employee allows them to marry and multiply in the knowledge that they have more of a chance to be financially secure and thus focus on matters of more import like family and The Church.

But, without the free hand, when government-favored monopolies or government itself is involved in the details of the market, a heavy thumb is pressed upon the scales of economic merit. That pressure always benefits the political class, nekulturny though they are, and the hangers on of the financial elite. It rarely benefits anyone it ostensibly is trying to uplift.

I’ve seen this firsthand during the several years I spent running homeless shelters for US military veterans. The various altruistic tourists who stopped by on a sanctimonious adventure many times bemoaned the evils of the nasty capitalistic system that brought these materially wounded paladins so low.

But speak to the benighted ones themselves and they cry out for more capitalism in the form of capital ventures that would result in the possibility of employment and thus regained solvency and self-respect.

But lo, did the legions of professional humanitarian weepers, and the current minions of Bernie, see this?

Certainly not!

Disregarding millennia of empirical evidence, they believe that the answer to poverty is more shared poverty; i.e.- to bring some people up you must bring others low.

As Roman Catholics, we value human dignity. There is little to no dignity in making success and achievement a crime and in doing so destroying the raw material of financial security for others. To strain a cliché, those who would unnecessarily stifle the dynamism, creativity, and generally favorable consequences of a free market not only kill the goose; they make a water fowl omelet out of the eggs.

Not a proper fate for so noble and industrious a creature.