On the popular new social media app Clubhouse, I recently listened in on a discussion with a young, self-styled “nationalist” conservative who reminded every participant in the room that human beings had lived under non-free market or capitalist-free conditions for most of history. Perceiving markets as bad or inhumane, he recommended a return to a feudal system.
One participant asked if he thought everyone should become Amish. Not a single soul who spoke agreed that they or any other American would find this appealing.
Yet, this imaginative young man was still right that free market capitalism is relatively new in the history of mankind — a history that was not great before capitalism infinitely improved the world and man’s place in it.
So says Donald J. Devine, whose new book, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism And The Moral Order, is a thorough challenge to left- and right-wing notions that free markets have been anything less than the greatest earthly liberating force man has ever seen.
Citing various scholars and thinkers, Devine pinpoints the 18th century as having the most drastic improvement for man due to the rise of free markets, but also highlights noticeable improvements due to a more embryonic capitalism going back as far as medieval times.
In our time, Devine features Rev. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, who in citing the International Labor Offices noted that “the estimated number of people earning $1.25 a day or less fell from 811 million in 1991 down to 375 million in 2013.”
Not bad, free market. Devine concludes, “No other explanation for that success is more plausible than the spread of market capitalism during that time.”
At a time in American politics in which socialism is receiving a fairer hearing than it deserves on the Left, due to the popularity and influence of figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a significant portion of the Right now seems to believe that the only problem with central planning is that conservatives haven’t been doing it, too, Devine’s book is a shot of sanity.
In dissecting “capitalism and the moral order,” Devine lays out how much damage central planners of many stripes and nations have wrought for centuries and also how the organic forces of individualism and liberalism have overcome those challenges time and again.
“The enormous complexity of the world, the limits of science, and the social importance of tradition and custom impose serious limits on the prospects for engineering a rational economy and perfecting society,” Devine writes. “As Friedrich Hayek concluded, the capitalist market, registering the innumerable free choices of individuals with diverse needs, is a more efficient means of processing social information and bringing a kind of rational order to economic and social activity that the state cannot.”
Devine, a former high-level Reagan staff member and lifelong advocate for fusionism, or historic American conservatism, sees the “enduring tension” as an eternal struggle between liberty and moral duty. Whereas many critics of capitalism have long argued that freedom can harm morality or vice versa, the author explores how they work in tandem and also that each can only truly succeed when adequately paired with the other.
“The tension between freedom and order is fundamental to capitalist civilization,” writes Devine.
In a time in American politics when too many on the Left and Right want to abolish capitalist civilization, Devine reminds us of the centuries of hard-earned liberty we would throw away with it.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
