Clueless Capitalists

Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and Irving Kristol have two things in common. All three recognized the extraordinary ability of market capitalism to produce goods, services, and wealth. And they hoped, believed, and feared, respectively, that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

The time may have come when these keen observers of the capitalist system are being proved right. Not because the state will have taken over all the means of production and distribution, as Communists and socialists would have it—or merely the "commanding heights of the economy," as Lenin would have it. The state no longer needs to own the means of production and distribution in order to control the economy, allocate capital to whatever purposes the state deems most desirable, and set prices, including the price of labor. To do that, it needs three things: a willingness to use regulation as a tool of control; the power to tax and subsidize; and a decline in the acceptability of capitalism, especially among the classes that have in the past benefited from its enormous productive power.

Donald Trump sees capitalism as a system in which businesses succeed by buying the approbation of politicians in power, no matter which party. Dollars buy access to those in positions to confer favor, no matter their beliefs. Doing business requires something other than the best product at the best price; it requires favors from the people in a position to grant them. His candor on the subject is not an adequate defense. Hillary Clinton takes a different view. The great wealth produced by capitalism is a sort of honey pot, and the game for a political leader is to figure out how to dip into it. Perhaps it takes getting elected to a high office; or establishing a seemingly charitable foundation; or getting in a position to dole out favors and collect IOUs to be cashed at just the right time; or linking all of the above and shaping it into a single large spoon with which to do the dipping, leaving no trace, as our colleague Daniel Halper lays out in detail in Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine.

To Ted Cruz capitalism is a wonder, as indeed it is, but also a merciless Darwinian process that requires, among other things, deportation sans pitié, taxing what workers buy rather than the incomes of the wealthy, abolishing the sensibly porous but nevertheless useful fence that assigns some territory to religion without making it a key feature of democratic government, and featuring disdain for the political process that underpins capitalism but requires pragmatic adjustment and, dare I say it, compromise if it is to continue to play that role.

To Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most transparent of the lot, capitalism is a system to be changed by a "revolution." No, not the bloody sort practiced by his socialist predecessors when he was honeymooning in the Soviet Union. And no, not one engineered by dispossessed horny-handed sons of toil seeking to be freed of their chains, but by a young army of privileged college students who should be forgiven for they know not what they do, owing to the absence of courses in Western civilization and an appalling lack of interest in the work of the Founding Fathers.
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