The Moral Case For Capitalism

Micheal Novak has posted the text of a speech he gave in Sri Lanka over at NRO.

Novak deals regularly with Asian issues and this speech, Wealth & Virtue, is exactly what South Asia needs. Explaining capitalism in its moral and material terms is a message that is rarely articulated in the Third World.

A small snipit of the article is his 10 moral advantages of capitalism:

In another place, I have counted ten different moral advantages that Hume and Smith foresaw in the new system they were commending to the practical energies of humankind. Time is too short to do more than mention these moral predictions briefly; I ask you to reflect on which of them still apply in Asia:

l. The rise of capitalism would break the habit of servile dependency, and awaken the longing for personal independence and freedom.

2. It would awaken the poor from isolation and indolence, by connecting them with the whole wide world of commerce and information.

3. It would diminish warlikeness, by turning human attention away from war and towards commerce and industry. It would, as Adam Smith writes, introduce "order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbors, and of a servile dependency on their superiors." (The Wealth of Nations, III, iv.4).

4. It would bring the peoples of each country and of the whole world into closer, more frequent, and complex interaction, and stimulate them to learn of new goods and new methods through international exchange.

5. It would mix the social classes together, break down class barriers, stimulate upward mobility, encourage literacy and civil discourse, and promote the impulse to form voluntary associations of many sorts.

6. It would mightily augment "human capital" by inciting the emulation of new specialties, skills, and techniques. In addition, it would impart new tastes, and encourage the pursuit of new information and new ways of doing things.

7. It would teach the necessity of civility, since under the pressures of competition in free markets, dominated by civil discourse and free choice, sellers would learn the necessity of patient explanation, civil manners, a willingness to be of service, and long-term reliability.

8. It would soften manners and instruct more and more of its participants to develop the high moral art of sympathy. For a commercial society depends on voluntary consent. Citizens must learn, therefore, a virtue even higher than empathy (which remains ego-centered, as when a person imagines how he would feel in another's shoes). True sympathy depends on getting out of oneself imaginatively and seeing and feeling the world, not exactly as the other person may see it, but as an ideal observer might see it. This capacity leads to the invention of new goods and services that might well be of use to others, even though they themselves have not yet imagined them.

9. It would instruct citizens in the arts of being farsighted, objective, and future-oriented, so as to try to shape the world of the future in a way helpful to as large a public as possible. Such public-spiritedness is a virtue that is good, not merely because it is useful, but because it seeks to be in line, in however humble a way, with the future common good.

10. Finally, it is one of the main functions of a capitalist economy to defeat envy. Envy is the most destructive of social evils, more so even than hatred. Hatred is highly visible; everyone knows that hatred is destructive. But envy is invisible, like a colorless gas, and it usually masquerades under some other name, such as equality. Nonetheless, a rage for material equality is a wicked project. Human beings are each so different from every other in talent, character, desire, energy, and luck, that material equality can never be imposed on human beings except through a thorough use of force. (Even then, those who impose equality on others would be likely to live in a way "more equal than others.") Envy is the most characteristic vice of all the long centuries of zero-sum economies, in which no one can win unless others lose. A capitalist system defeats envy, and promotes in its place the personal pursuit of happiness. It does this by generating invention, discovery, and economic growth. Its ideal is win-win, a situation in which everyone wins. In a dynamic world, with open horizons for all, life itself encourages people to attend to their own self-discovery and to pursue their own personal form of happiness, rather than to live a false life envying others.

Good stuff indeed...