Ideas@TheCentre
Making the moral case for capitalism
Those committed to the great redistributionist project of the welfare state regard the concepts of capitalism and virtue as uneasy bedfellows.
Whereas the exercise of virtue tends to shape the habits of decent behaviour, popular conceptions of capitalism are tinged with images of indecency, rapaciousness and greed. That’s why, according to the 2012 John Bonython Lecturer, Charles Murray, ‘capitalism has become a dirty word.’
Far from being a critical part of the wealth creation that made the United States so prosperous, Murray argues that capitalism is increasingly portrayed as ‘the destructive manipulation of power to enrich individuals at the expense of ordinary Americans.’
So in his Bonython Lecture, Capitalism and Virtue: Reaffirming Old Truths, Murray set out to update the case for capitalism, and in doing so, drew up on the extensive research that informed his most recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.
Murray is concerned that the United States is coming apart at the seams, and that it has been doing so for 50 years. The collapse and decline of a common culture bound by shared social values is to be seen in the marked divergence of classes that has been taking place more or less since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
At the heart of this change, which Murray has documented carefully, is the decay in the founding virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity. He argues that these virtues have a direct relationship with happiness – a ‘justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole.’
Advocates of welfarism maintain that capitalists, or libertarian proponents of the free market, have abdicated their responsibility to pursue virtue. Murray counters this by showing how the reintegration of capitalism with virtue can serve only to strengthen individual happiness and self-fulfillment so essential for a healthy and free society.
Libertarians love freedom – freedom of trade, freedom under law, and freedom of religion, to name just three. But the defence of freedom does not necessarily amount to a moral case for freedom.
Having won the freedom we cherish, we bear a moral responsibility for deciding what we will do with it and how we will live. ‘If we are to make the moral case for capitalism,’ Murray argued, ‘we need to be living the lives we celebrate … This in turn requires us to return to the vocabulary of virtue.’
Failure to exercise this moral duty threatens to leave a void in the national conversation that will then be filled by those persisting in the view that the only antidote to capitalism and its perceived attendant evils is greater encroachment by the state into the lives of the citizenry.
The time is upon us for lovers of freedom to attend with urgency to the cultivation of virtue and the renewal of the civic catechism of a shared life.
Rev Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow with the Religion and the Free Society Program at The Centre for Independent Studies. A video of the 2012 John Bonython lecture will be released in the coming weeks.
