Free Markets Are Easy to Attack When You Misrepresent Them

David L. Bahnsen

Sunday, December 18, 2022

 

In the December 2022 issue of First Things, editor Rusty Reno starts off with a doozy.

 

Capitalism is best understood as the modern ambition to order and value all available resources solely on the basis of market principles.

 

If the intent was to demonstrate the inadequacy of using the word “capitalism” to describe a properly ordered vision for a free society, I might not be so bothered. I have become increasingly animated by my contention that the word “capitalism” is an unwise term for those who believe in the miracle and promotion of a market economy. The not-so-subtle implication that the focus in laissez-faire economics is on “capital” versus “human action” is problematic and plays into the hands of those who believe they can steward the affairs of mankind better than the forces of freedom, individual responsibility, and self-interest can. However, Reno was not trying to make my point about the poor vocabulary of “capitalism.” Rather, he was erecting a purposeful and egregious straw man as the pretext for his article; the more market defenders can be reduced to a materialist myth, the easier it is to discredit them. This does not serve genuine intellectual debate.

 

Reno proceeds to do in this article what he has been doing not so subtly for the last five or six years — undermining the tenets of a free-enterprise worldview without explicitly offering the alternative solution that his criticism commands. It is understandable in a sense — anyone claiming that “one­-sided enthusiasm for the promise of capitalism is ever falsified by experience” is wise to avoid a discussion of the failures of central planning. I believe readers of First Things caught on some time ago that Reno prefers to criticize a market economy without closing the circle, or without an epistemological self-consciousness as to what he is suggesting, and that may be the more effective tactic for one of Reno’s agenda.

 

I am appreciative of Reno’s most recent piece in that it unpacks important questions for which defenders of a free and virtuous society have answers. It provides a construction of argument that highlights where Reno is admirable in intent, and where his logical breakdown goes wrong. Dissecting these errors and categories is crucial for those passionate about this subject.

 

Fundamental to Reno’s contentions has been the failure of “capitalism” to “encourage the discipline of our wants.” He sees market forces as responsible for our enslavement “to the worldly regime of sin and death.” He portrays the market-friendly view as a “utopian” belief in “self-correction” and “self-limitation.” He has harsh words for those who (rightly) see his vision as one of “unprecedented government intervention” or “conservative social engineering.” Indeed, he offers up the World Trade Organization as an example of how governments, not markets, can become a powerful influence on the global economy. “Where is the conservative version of a World Trade Organization?” he implicitly asks. One can be excused for confusion over whether we are supposed to be embracing globalism or repudiating it, but I digress. His essential theme, consistently argued for years, is that markets have failed to deliver the interests of the common good and that “policies that limit capitalism” are the need of the hour.

 

He suggests that a “cultural politics” that restrains our market ideology and “ameliorates its pathologies” is the ideal antidote. He tackles head-on the immediate antidotes long advocated by those who care for a vision of a free and virtuous society; the family and the church are not enough, in his view. He would also “add the nation, a more ambiguous force, but an important one.” Lest readers be left with ambiguity over his suggestion, he says the part many have hesitated to say: “If we wish to sustain capitalism in the twenty-first century, then we need to use political power to renew and strengthen these non-market love societies.”

 

He proceeds to offer a list of items plaguing the culture (many of which I and readers would agree with entirely), and a less compelling list of prescriptions. One gets the feeling he is building toward a comprehensive or specific argument for a particular strategy, approach, or policy portfolio. Instead, we get back to the same platitudes: Markets are creating bad things in the culture, and via the coercive power of the state we can rectify this. But he doesn’t say how. The awkward conclusion is a substitute for an argument: “Nation, family, and Church are bulwarks against the tendency of capitalism to turn every relationship into a market transaction. We need to use the art of politics to renew and strengthen these love societies.”

 

The major reason that specifics cannot be offered as to how the political sphere is to force virtue upon a society that allows for market freedom in transactions is because the political sphere can do no such thing. Indeed, as a basic tautology, virtue is not compulsory, and while a tight legal order to punish criminal behavior is vital for a functioning society, economists, theorists, and our own founders have always been aware of the limitations of a coercive state. No amount of state power in the marketplace can foster love and gratitude. The unwillingness to accept this basic reality of moral philosophy — that doing good is not good when it is forced; that acts of charity are only charitable when they are voluntary — sticks to Reno’s arguments throughout. In many ways he wants what I want — a common good, a religious society, a well-ordered life aimed at human flourishing.

 

But Rusty Reno and the cabal of new-right market skeptics are stuck with the age-old problem identified by the Founders, and yes, by 20th-century giants such as Friedman and Hayek: We have no option to be ruled by angels. The doctrine of the Fall does not merely inform our understanding of the original sin plaguing individuals and families, but also and especially the state itself. That an individual left unchecked and free of moral enlightenment may suffer in weak discipline and low taste is both true and tragic. But that a civil magistrate granted the power Reno envisions for it represents a more potent and damaging fruit of original sin is, indeed, the testimony of history. On this point there can be no refutation. I prefer that the low-brow permeation of social-media obsession die a holy death, yet inviting the ghosts of 20th-century past to regulate consumer preferences strikes me as a ghastly trade-off.

 

Reno’s ongoing mistakes are derived from his first mistake — the straw-man claim that market orthodoxy seeks to value everything solely on market principles. This simply is not true. A rigorous defense of the price mechanism in how goods and services are transacted does not require any such framework for how we understand truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Believing in the transcendent things and believing in them with the depth and breadth that moral enlightenment and spiritual nourishment provide makes us better market actors. That Reno and I are living in a time where the clear and unmistakable maladies of culture are evidenced in the marketplace does not make the forum for our observation the cause of what we observe. I know it is frustrating, unsatisfying, and in many cases, unacceptable, but the moral deterioration of society evidenced in various aspects of our marketplace are the fruits of idolatry, low regard for family, disdain for neighbor, and a general abandonment of Ten Commandments ethics. Markets cannot assure regard for neighbor or beauty, but a disdain for markets can assure us of impoverished conditions for our neighbors and a limited landscape for the creation of beauty.

 

The time has come to refresh and reaffirm what markets can and cannot be expected to do in present times. Reno’s exasperations notwithstanding, markets remain an imperfect but potent force for promoting mutual cooperation and dynamic creativity. The cultivation of liberty is, itself, a virtue, and the “necessary but not sufficient” nature of it is the missing piece from this debate.

 

A moral and religious foundation is the soil in which a market economy must be gardened. The tradition of those who knew and understood this is rich, and it is a false dilemma to force the Randian and secularist construct of market virtue upon this debate. Market defenders like me must not ascribe to markets more of a burden than they can deliver and must not lose sight of the cultural terrain we seek for our markets to most flourish. For true defenders of a free and virtuous society, the trap that market skeptics try to set by reducing our aspiration to mere GDP growth or national income must be rejected. I reject the consumerist dynamic that animates Reno just as I reject the suggestions Reno has for treating it.

 

Rather, I come back to the Garden of Eden for the framework of my market advocacy. Reno is wrong that our goal is to order and value all resources according to market pricing. He is right to reject consumerism as a modern religion. But in the Garden, we find the ultimatum of creation that drives my market advocacy and my rejection of the state as the benevolent imposer of virtue and good taste — mankind as a producer, a co-creator with God in the cultivation and extraction of creation.

 

Coercion and central planning are failed substitutes for the need of the hour. Diminishing free society undermines mankind’s productive capacity. Dissatisfaction with the state of consumption habits must be met with a refreshed passion for mankind’s created nature. The vision of mankind as created with dignity in the image of God stands against a vision for the nation-state as our economic administrator. I agree with Rusty that mere fidelity to economics of free exchange will not assure us of the common good. But I assert that his prescriptions will assure its destruction. The Burkean vision for society is the hard way right now. But like God said to man in the garden, “it’s time to get to work.”