A Conservative Critique of Capitalism
An unfettered market democratizes cultural transformation, this societal reorganization driven by the basest instincts of man. Free enterprise claims to make virtue from selfishness, and in some ways, it succeeds (incentives efficient creation of desired goods and services). Far too often, however, incentive structures driving innovation also subtly usher in a systemic elevation of America’s favorite golden calf. The concept of wealth as the highest good is, to a degree, inevitable in a nation alike the United States. Brick by brick, the proverbial temple is deconstructed, the marketplace colonizing once-holy ground.
While the forces of capitalism slash abject poverty at an accelerating rate (and that is certainly worth something), the indispensable traditions of the world are reinvented according to a new creed. Contrary to the suggestions of capitalism, the good is not equivalent to the profitable.
Virtue as the Highest Good
Virtue, rather than progress or prosperity, is the highest good. In the tradition of the Stoic Philosophers, and more recently, the Russian literary savant, Fydor Dostoevsky (my favorite author), we must, recognize virtue as the highest good. Universal health, wealth, comfort, and progress are good, necessary, and useful, but we cannot lose the wisdom of our fathers in their perpetual service. What we do matters, but so does the motivation. The conclusions that we come to matter, but so do the rationales. End results matters, but so does the mechanism by which that end is brought about.
The free market (and other secondary factors) has doubled our lifespan in the past 200 years, but what is the good of living 80 years instead of 40, when they are characterized by bitterness, ingratitude, faithlessness, corruption, and selfishness? Instead of requiring hypothetical economic opportunity and freedom, the poor and needy offer a canvas for which virtue may display itself. If you have two coats and your brother has none, to give him yours is still higher than to cut the price in half by more efficient manufacturing processes.
Individual Sovereignty as a Limited Concept
Libertarians insist: any action should legal unless the action violates the rights and sovereignty of others. Any consensual action with another, they say, ought to be protected and upheld. To them, I say: there is no action without implication on one’s family, community, and the greater world.
What I do, even when alone in my home, ever so slightly, transforms social norms. When my wife and I resolve to tear our family apart via divorce, such an annulment becomes ever more acceptable for my neighbor. With age of sexual consent laws, as well as general consent laws regarding the intellectually disabled, our society and legal system recognize the consent is not legitimate on its own right: it must be fully informed and understood. In response to this, I emphasize the fact that none of us fully understand the implications of our consensual interactions, none of us are fully informed, none of us grasp the ripples that will result from our decisions. Consent alone is not enough.
Too often, what is legal becomes permissible, and what is permissible becomes legal (divorce, drugs, racial discrimination, physician assisted suicide, alcohol, pornography, abortion, child beating). Free speech? Yes. Democracy? Yes. Freedom from formal national religion? Yes. Freedom to be a raging alcoholic, grease stains on one’s tank-top, causing irrevocable damage the lives of one’s family and community? No. This standard is ideally enforced by community or church, but if the state is the only institution willing to take on societal degradation, so be it (and let us ensure that the state doesn’t abuse its newfound authority).
Opposition to Command Economies
To be clear, utopian conceptions of command economies are fatally flawed. The 20th century taught us that. It is hard to know who should be responsible for determining incentivized behavior (and therefore generally adhered to behavior), but it is clear that the free market, and the appetites of man when unencumbered by social expectation or law, soon make the practical from the beautiful, the profane from the sacred, and the materialistic from the decent. All evidence would indicate that the free market is the most efficient tool for the growth of wealth and prosperity, even for the most impoverished, but at what cost is this still desirable? The market is necessary, but it can be formed to better serve the upright instincts and tastes of humanity, rather than the base. As Rousseau said, “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”
Once we master and understand our established economic institutions, only then can we, incrementally and with caution, transform them to better serve the perpetuation of virtue, communities, culture, and traditions. I am not the authority who ought to make legal and regulatory decisions, but there is more legitimate authority than the collective when driven by unrestrained lust for material accumulation (maybe… the collective, when constructed on tradition, art, culture, story, and religion are a closer approximation for a legitimate mechanism behind institutional action and authority).
The new gospel is here, conservatives, and your free market has made some vital contributions. John Adams rightly said, “The constitution,” (and the liberalism that it represents, I’ll add) “was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.”
Eleven-point criticism
I. In capitalistic societies, there is too close an association between the social and economic.
In America, the widespread use of the accurately coined term ‘socio-economic status’ is an unfortunate indicator of a society too fixated on the economic. There is no avoiding social hierarchies, and evolutionary biologists often assert that the instinct for social belonging unrivaled in motivational sway, in developed nations. These social hierarchies, however, ought to be predicated on something really good, such as courage, virtue, or wisdom; hierarchies and incentive structures based on competency (to the degree that they are) and economic utility are limited in scope.
Social attitudes are, generally, subservient to market factors. An unfortunate feedback loop is created when media profits from capitalizing on public opinion, and then public opinion is too-largely driven and determined by that same media. The perverse economic marketplace, it turns out, is actually a primary driver of a more sacred place of exchange, the marketplace of ideas.
It is also the case that when the politically influential and wealthy align, when those who have benefited from an economic system are in positions of political influence, they are unlikely to fully see the faults of the same economic system that enabled their success.
II. What people want is not what they need.
Free exchange enables peoples to purchase the goods and services that they want. Unfortunately, what we want, in the immediate sense, is not what we need. We are best when we defer gratification and do not allow our immediate desires to govern us. This we know, but we must also recognize that a market unfettered enables hedonism. When the production and trade of cigarettes, pornography, soda, prostitution, and alcohol are unchecked by social conventions and forces, regulatory limitation becomes necessary.
Regulation on indulgent and destructive products and services allows our better senses to prevail, when, in moments of cold rationalism, we can restrict ease of access to a product, putting roadblocks between consumers and the product when temptation arises. Supporters of an obstructed market would retort that a consumer is able to temper and limit himself in a moment of decision. As a counterpoint, I would point to the relationship that many in developed nations, myself included, share with their cellphones: we seek to use them less, but practical action to that end is difficult. Because of this, there are website blockers and screen-time limits. Many a time, I would have wasted hours on Instagram, had I not, in moments of better conviction, made the website inaccessible by using limitations and blockers. In a similar way, we can limit the production or consumption of products and services that we all regard as harmful.
Additionally, advertisement and emotional manipulation create false wants and needs. Corporations rarely have your best interest in mind and are often wiling to capitalize on your shortsightedness.
III. There is an association between the good and the profitable.
It is an unfortunate reality that, among many corporations, the good is equated to the useful. People, for example, are treated according to their relevancy to a corporation’s aims. The loyal and tenured but frugal client is discarded in favor of the wealthy socialite. The faithful, friendly, and diligent but incapable worker is mocked by his peers and supervisors. The red carpet is rolled out for investors, whose unfunny quips are laughed at, whom false congratulations are extended to, whose abused of power go uncited: people are, and must be (should profit be maximized), treated as obstacles or tools for the purpose of corporate expansion. The pursuit of profit often makes a misrepresenting, lying, disingenuous, compromising, self-hating, corporate conformist out of the best of men.
IV. Laisser-Faire capitalism justifies degrading treatment of peoples.
Defenders of the free market rightly point out the voluntary nature of transactions in a capitalistic economy. Workers making $1.50 per day in Indonesian Nike Sweat shops could, hypothetically, leave their job and work elsewhere. This fact is used as justification for company like Nike to treat their workers dismally. Consent alone is not enough to make a transaction ethical.
V. Public opinion converges upon a market-determined orthodoxy, directed by an ever-shrinking group with an ever-expanding share of power.
Another regrettable reality is the very-real presence of the Pareto distribution. This term is used to describe the mathematical pattern which reflects the distribution of wealth in a society (and the tendency for that comparative wealth gap to continually expand). This fact of this distribution poses a few problems.
In many ways, money can be equated to power, information, and vote. In a democracy, these all are deeply interconnected. For example, there is an infinite set of facts, but what determines which facts are subject of attention (or even discovery)?
Well, Mark Zuckerberg’s nearly 500-million-dollar investment into an organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, advancing increased voter turnout most notably in democrat-controlled areas, may have an influence. Centralized repositories of information also do exist, such as Wikipedia, which has come to be trusted for the same reason it initially wasn’t, it is publicly edited. Much of the same could be said of popular media (also see clickbait and sensationalist journalism, a unique creation of a free market, especially in the digital era).
Public consensus can be great, but in the establishment of an orthodoxy, a range of acceptable opinions, we should recognize the hand of an increasingly centralized and small group of people in power. The selection process by which the wealthy are determined is also relevant in determination of what is shared belief among the powerful (which often becomes shared belief among the normative public). The same spirit that selects the powerful, then, selects the views that become societal creed.
Additionally, whatever is profitable becomes publicly espoused dogma for corporations, and when corporations influence the daily lives of workers and consumers to the degree that they now do, this becomes an issue. Whatever is momentarily in vogue in harnessed by corporations, and social sentiments follow. The LGBT Pride Month was, according to many economic and social progressives, hijacked for corporate brand and advertising purposes. The gay community, however, should be grateful that the market, however diluted and insincere, is momentarily working for them, and not against them.
Cultural influence should be placed in the hands of the honest in speech, virtuous in action, wise in thought, and grateful in tradition, who are willing to conserve where the established is vital and reinvent when the established has become, or been revealed as, oppressive. In an otherwise market economy, this can only occur through centralized selection. An uncorrupted and well-oriented church could do the job, or even a well-organized democratically controlled government. The spirit of the market disregards the wisdom of our ancestors, however, and cultural norm is established by the same hedonism and expediency that drags an addict back to the nearest convenience store for another “voluntary purchased” lottery ticket.
As Noam Chomsky, a surprising ally to disenchanted conservatives, put it, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
VI. Incentive structures reward the possessed, passionate, and unbalanced.
Wealth only means so much. It is a shame that men and women so often lay community, family, wisdom, story, religion, tradition, and meaningful existence at the altar of career. Incentive structures, however, reward those unwaveringly committed to career over all else (including principals and ethical behavior). The realtor willing to take a call at 3 am will get the job over the realtor unwilling. This is a shame because sleep is important. More significantly, this same principal applies across areas beyond sleep.
Popular digital ‘influencer’ and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk in known for glorifying ‘hustling’, touting himself for working 100-hour workweeks, encouraging others to dedicate themselves to the implied ultimate cause: accruing wealth. This behavior is neither admirable nor praised in any society apart from our hyper-industrialized, hyper-corporatized, free market-idolizing, materialistic 21st century civilization.
As opposed to wealth, a better metric, if one must be assigned, for a meaningful and well-lived life is the number (and quality) of funeral attendees upon someone’s death. Self-interest in the service of wealth is self-defeating, as the only ultimate utility in wealth is that it creates capacity for generosity, stability, creativity, leisure, experience, and community.
Again, if you have two coats and your brother has none, to give him yours is still higher than to cut the price in half by more efficient manufacturing processes.
VII. The rising sea brings up all ships: true, but comparative economic degradation can be as abject as absolute economic degradation.
Despite the existence of the aforementioned Pareto distribution, the tendency of wealth and material prosperity to increase for all, over time, is inarguable and substantial. The average global lifespan has doubled for the last 200 years, buying power (in butter), for a farmer in America has increased nearly 20-fold. Before the pandemic, the number of people in absolute poverty was decreasing more rapidly than ever before. And money does correspond with happiness, in America, up to an annual salary of $70,000 (enough to keep the bill collectors at bay, per say).
This all speaks to the testament of free trade, but also worth consideration is the reality that dignity and social position, arguably more important that actual degree of material prosperity, are derived from comparative position and not absolute position. As Malcom Gladwell pointed out in his famous speech, STEM majors have virtually identical dropout rates at Harvard and standard state schools. These students who would be the brightest of the brightest at other schools, become discouraged, unmotivated, and eventually dropout due to comparative position in relation with those around them, not because of absolute position. The same could be said of wealth; French kings in the Middle Ages may have been living like the lower-middle class today in absolute economic terms, but the two are not equivalent in comparative economic terms, and that makes all the difference.
VIII. The market only incentivizes ethical behavior in areas where strictly monitored.
I came across a sign, outside of a restaurant, that said “This establishment is partially employed by those on the Autism spectrum and others with metal and physical disabilities.” Although I admire the company’s employment policy, providing occupation for those who would otherwise be without in a ruthless market economy, they were advertising their supposedly altruistic actions in order to benefit economically. In the same vein, it is common to come across advertisements about a company’s impressive environmental policy or position on social issues. It is good that companies are concerned about such things, but the companies (that is, the most successful ones) are only concerned about ethical behavior in realms in which such behavior is rewarded by the market.
I participate in the nationally known business role-playing club, DECA, at my school. DECA exams are full of multiple-choice questions (constructed for the sake of test security) like, “Jim, an American, is traveling to China for a business trip. What is one reason that he should he take care to be culturally sensitive?” The answer is always, “Business deals are more likely to occur when he is respectful and culturally understanding.” This same type of question is asked in regard to business ethics, socially sensitive corporate behavior, non-fraudulent accounting, and fair customer service. The creators of the test want, with all of their hearts, for the profitable to be equivalent to the ethical.
The profitable is only equivalent to the ethical, as it turns out, in areas in which the ethical is monitored and is the subject of popular concern. Restaurants with racially segregated dining rooms would fail today, even without legal repercussion, because people are rightfully sensitive about overt racial discrimination. The same cannot be said of restaurants in the 1960s, and therefore legal regulation was necessitated, despite the fact that a market for “whites-only” diners did, very much, exist.
IX. Tradition is torn from its roots and transformed according to popular tastes.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. The market fosters practical ingratitude for where we have come from, the traditions that made us and pin down the fabric of our culture. If a practice or tradition is not apparent in its expediency, the market prunes it.
My favorite YouTube cook, historian, journalist, and food scientist, Adam Ragusa, makes dishes as the lone expression of his Italian American heritage. In this practice, he makes inciteful and precise commentary on, what I extend to, the balance between tradition and progress in all realms. Ragusa makes, for example, his grandma’s spaghetti and meatballs recipe. Commenting on the dish's significance to his heritage, Ragusa sees that he, his ancestors, and his descendants, are united through this hereditary dish. Still, he is comfortable changing this dish, in minor ways, while adhering to the core of his grandma’s recipe. Cooking equipment, techniques, and needs have changed, so Ragusa’s recipe has, too. His grandmother cooked in larger batches, for example, so larger meatballs were established in her recipe. Ragusa prefers smaller meatballs, but in his alterations, he preserves the integrity and identity of the recipe, and, perhaps more importantly, the spirit, principals, and patterns of his grandmother, who changed the recipe in small ways herself. Adam Ragusa’s meatballs offer a beautiful illustration for the balancing act between tradition and progress.
If Ragusa were to make an Italian American restaurant, this beautiful balancing act would be all for naught: the recipe would be tainted and diluted as consumers through the market demand more sugar in the sauce, chicken tenders on the kid’s menu, and decrease in authenticity and quality of the commodities.
The great culinary and experiential heritage associated would be lost to the free market. There must be a protection of tradition against popular tastes, to some degree. The dissolution of great tradition and rise of historical ingratitude come along with a free market. Continued cultural reinvention, along with technological revolution, informational revolution, and the rise of materialism are inevitable in an economy unbarred and unrestricted.
Materialism is inevitable under capitalism. And material advancement as means of good, instead of virtue as the means of good, is incomplete. To a non-trivial degree, the free market is limited in compatibility with the preservation of tradition.
X. Many hold the unfortunate belief that the most important work of their life is their career.
What people do in their career, especially when it is as soul-sucking as 8-hour days spent sending emails and attending business meetings in a cubicle, is not the most important work of their lives. Instead, who one is, the integrity and virtue displayed in their actions, is significant. Why would anyone sacrifice an ounce of virtue for a pile of gold?
You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? — Mathew 7:16, KJV
Aside from self-hatred and moral compromise that is all-to frequent in the pursuit of economic advancement, engagement in community is more meaningful than engagement in corporatism and materialism, regardless.
When I am asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The response sought is, “Realtor,” “Teacher,” or “Supply chain manager”. I am always tempted to shock my inquirers by responding, “A reliable father, a pillar of my community, a well-read and wise thinker, and a man of God.” That would be a more suitable and meaningful answer.
XI. Presently, there is a regrettable disconnection between work and life.
The following will constitute what will be the first and only reference to Marx’s work in this essay. In description of Marx’s view, the website MRonline states,
In his Manuscripts, Marx defined alienation in terms of a process by which the product of labor becomes an external object for workers, but also a power that confronts them as something foreign and hostile.
As a part of his theory of alienation, Marx emphasized the disassociated between work and life. On a farm, they are one. In a feudal society, they are one. We should not do what we despise, and Marx rightly recognizes that the self-hatred, internal conflict, and identity crisis associated with the division of labor and life, and the selling of oneself for the sake of a corporation, is a unique creation of capitalism (or rather industrialization, but industrialization as a result of capitalism).
XII. Daycares cannot be rasing the children.
In a time when community, meaning, family, and tradition are lacking, economic expediency drives both mothers and fathers to devote themselves to career, and elect to ship the kids off to daycare. Daycares are impersonal. Daycare workers often operate as representatives of popular society. And as stated in point 5, popular views function as an axillary and extension of the perverse economic market. Neither the state, nor representatives of popular society, will be raising my kids.
I am certain that there are wonderful daycare workers, and wonderful daycares generally, but I include this point to bring attention to the communal and familial implications of too high an emphasis on the material and economic.
XIII. Transhumanism — virtual reality, microchips, artificial intelligence and unbounded technological advancement— poses a threat to our existence.
It is driven my marketization and militarization. The pursuit of efficiency and technological progress could kill us (or, more probably, deform us as to sufficiently be considered non-human). This is too dangerous to be experimenting with. Let us all work practically to end it.
Solutions
What is appropriate action, then, in response to these observations? Here are some.
Ban all federal elected politicians and their families from making any source of income or gifts aside from their documented political salaries, forever (along with increasing these salaries and provide lifetime penchant). Revitalize the electoral college, in the image of Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68, and eliminate campaigning. Nationalize social media (have unregulated platforms of speech without algorithms or recommended content). Reestablish senator election by state representatives. Require identity conformation to access social media. Nationalize search engines. Slash the bureaucracy, make classified information, all but what is absolutely necessary, public. Reduce the influence of the national bank and the Federal Reserve. Criminalize the production of pornography, lottery, and drugs. Require rehab treatment for alcoholism, smoking, gambling addiction, and drug usage. Abolish the death penalty. Reinstitute fault-only divorce law. Reinvent the tax code to truly eliminate loopholes (flat tax? single tax?). Incentivize ethical behavior. Establish a single-payer health care system (always with a proportional but small co-pay). Fund art and literature. Return to culture, tradition, and story. Make communities and families the unit of society. Push back against sexual permissiveness in culture. Stop encouraging universal voting. Invest in infrastructure. Incentivize multi-generational homes. Foster the elevation of Christian values (but not Christian identity — and not fundamentalist Christian values).
And most importantly (and ironically, given the political nature of this essay), emphasize individual agency, the reorienting of one’s life towards the greatest possible good, as the ideal for each person. Structural change can be necessary and good (the subject of this essay is advocacy for structural change, after all), but individual change should always proceed and supersede it.
As for an unfettered market, it is time for conservatives to realize that it does not serve the advancement of the virtues which we so idealistically prize. And as Winston Churchill so whimsically observed:
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.
And similarly, I observe that capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all those others that have been tried. So let us not ideologically cleave to the concept of an uncorrectable market, when what is good is so clearly far from what is profitable, and what we want is so clearly far from what we need.
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill
