...and Happy New Year from Jonah Goldberg, too!
It's best not to stare too closely at Goldberg's work, but I was perusing the New York Post at lunch and tripped over his latest incoherent stab at absolutism: complaining that indictments of "capitalism" make our wonderful, innovative economic system look too bad.
Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.”
I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done, particularly of late: reducing “capitalism” to its alleged sins.
And that’s the point. There are few areas of life where a thing responsible for so much good gets so little credit for it.
...
Every good thing capitalism helps produce — from singing careers to cures for diseases to staggering charity — is credited to some other sphere of our lives. Every problem with capitalism, meanwhile, is laid at her feet. Except the problems with capitalism — greed, theft, etc. — aren’t capitalism’s fault, they’re humanity’s. Socialist countries have greedy thieves, too.
Free markets are in disrepute these days, particularly by the people running Washington. For them, government is the solution and capitalism is the problem. If they have their way over the next decade, they won’t cure what allegedly ails capitalism — people will still steal and lie — but they will impede everything that makes capitalism great. And that will be bad for everyone, even NPR.
In that in-between part I elided past, Goldberg cites examples of the wonderfulness of capitalism - they apparently boil down to the fact that rich people with money are benevolent, and iTunes beating WalMart as the nation's leading music retailer is a triumph of innovation (as opposed to, say WalMart slicing profit margins out of its suppliers, or paying it workers near poverty wages... oh wait, that's innovative capitalism too!)
Goldberg's being no more slack in his thinking than usual, but the point here is really telling: if you needed more evidence of what's ailing the right (as if that weren't crystal clear by now), it's in Goldberg's absolutism. Raise questions about capitalism's failings? Are you daft? A communist? Goldberg would, probably point out that his point is not that capitalism isn't flawed, but that the good points - innovation, open markets, wealth accumulation - are never credited to the system, only the bad things.
That's naive at best, and willfully obtuse at worst: more to the point, Goldberg can't seem to accept that any flaw in how capitalism works deserves consideration. He dismisses pretty much every concern raised as a "societal" problem (like, greed) that is bigger than the system. Too easy, and too general. And that slack, lazy approach to deep thought is a good indication of how hard and long the right will still need to work to try and get its act together.
It would be easy enough, and cost nothing, for Goldberg to acknowledge, and thoughtfully examine, some of the things that capitalism - such as it is - in the US has gotten wrong in recent years. The fact that unregulated free markets - for all the opportunities they offer to amass capital - can be damaging to the society as a whole ( a reasonable lesson, I think, out of the banking and foreclosure crises. Or how to balance free market impulses with social problems stemming from poverty. Something. Instead, his column amounts to "if you can't say something nice about capitalism... you're the problem." And if that kind of mindless cheerleading is all the right has to offer, then they're unlikely to succeed in stemming the leftward swing of the economic and educated elites.
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