The New York Times this weekend carried a truly puzzling essay railing against capitalism. It’s puzzling in part because it is such an exercise black-and-white, good-guy/bad-guy, broad-strokes, over-generalization. (“I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor?”)
It’s also puzzling because the article is all about “capitalists,” but it shows zero effort to define that term, and seems to operate on an incoherent definition of the term.
“Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form…” the author writes. So clearly, he doesn’t mean “free enterprise” when he writes capitalism. Wall Street is a bailed-out industry that depends today on sub-market-rate credit made available by implicit government support. Banks are all clients of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Their biggest business partner is the U.S. Treasury. Government guarantees private bank loans on housing, green energy, and exports, promising public risk for private profit. Wall Street is the opposite of free markets.
The author’s examples of capitalists are “Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck.” Those are mostly non-finance companies, so he’s not defining “capitalism” to mean financiers. Also, Enron, BP, and GE all lobbied for federal climate-change legislation. BP also backed solar subsidies, the stimulus, and the Wall Street bailout. Goldman profited off of bailouts and supported federal ethanol mandates, Philip Morris supported FDA regulation of tobacco, Merck supported Obamacare and Medicare expansion, and its entire profit model is based on government-granted monopolies.
Later, the author, William Deseriewicz, acknowledges how his “capitalists” love them some government, as he charges them with “Leaving the public to pick up the tab,” and “feeding at the Public Trough.”
So maybe Deseriewicz defines “capitalist” as “people pursuing profit.” But that’s almost everyone besides monks.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Deseriewicz defines capitalists as “people pursuing profit by any means necessary, including illegal and immoral.” And yes, I’ll agree with him, that such people are bad. I just don’t think that’s a useful definition of the word.
