And thanks to Pierre Tristram for reminding us of the self-evident.
Capitalism didn’t get us into this. Unbridled capitalism and self-indulgence did, beginning with the rise in the 1980s of the cult of the free market. To this day conservatives peddle the fallacy that Adam Smith, considered the father of capitalism, wouldn’t have had it any other way, just as we shouldn’t have it any other way as we move forward. But Smith was a great believer in trade unions and public works. Businessmen’s motives left him queasy, because he saw them as little more than bundles of self-interest who seldom gave a whit to the common good (“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” he wrote.) And Smith was a great believer in taxes and wealth redistribution so that, in his words, “the indolence and vanity of the rich is made to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the poor.” In sum, he would have fit right in with the New Deal, or something like it if the Obama administration had the courage to enact it.
