God Money?

John Schwenkler draws my attention to this:

Capitalism the Creator

The Mises Circle goes to Seattle to address contemporary issues in liberty, and the role of capitalism as the main force for every form of progress in our age. We live amidst its fruits — technology, culture, philanthropy, human well being — and have yet to appreciate the source. Indeed, among the most passionate opponents of the free market are those who have benefitted most enormously from it. Here we have a profound failure of understanding at work.

Well, I am a big fan of capital. My main — possibly my only — problem with capitalism is that it’s so devoted to public opinion, yet so unable to control it. This is a little bit of a contrary thing to say, since most critics of capitalism rage against the way that commodification dupes otherwise innocent people into lusting after objects they never would otherwise. Commodification merely empowers them to act on their longing for what others have, and it does so, indeed, in a way (thank you Paul Zak) that’s far less violent than it otherwise would be. Like a good renegade Protestant, I insist that the upright individual always bears personal responsibility for differentiating between needs and wants (even as those terms shift with the times and with particular circumstances).

The main Marxist (but really Rousseauvian) line of attack tries to outdo me here by charging that capitalism manufactures real needs which are nonetheless unnatural, i.e. corrupt. My counterargument is that this sometimes is so, but (a) natural corruption is more of a problem than artificial/historical corruption at the margins, (b) eliminating artificial corruption will never erase our natural/ahistorical corruption, and (c) sometimes as the human race blunders forward we encounter problems that can’t be solved very cleanly or beautifully, and we should thank God that we fudged through the rotten times in a way that enabled us to somehow wind up here.

So I’m perfectly willing, actually, to appreciate the creative power of capitalism, so long as we recognize that human creation is never unconditionally good, because the power of humans is naturally or ahistorically errant. I’d further go out on a crazy limb and claim that Christians, deists, atheists, and others can all share this position, at least in theory. Both capitalism and human creativity lose much of the fear factor if the twin illusions of innate human goodness and human perfectibility are tossed out the window. Bottom line: when it comes to creative capital unhinged, the “relentless pursuit of perfection” is basically fine when applied to a Lexus and horrible when applied to Man.