The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 27alleged consequences were justified, then capitalism itself would be justified.And not by bread alone. 55The late Robert Nozick wrote that “what is desired is an organization ofsociety optimal for people who are far less than ideal, optimal also formuch better people, and which is such that living under such an organizationitself tends to make people better and more ideal.” 56 Nozick and I sayit’s capitalism. We say that socialism works only for an impossibly idealSocialist Man, or a Christian saint, and that socialism tends to make peopleworse, not better.The ethical betterment is not achieved, I repeat, at the cost of the remainingpoor people. That is a fact to be established. I do not expect you to agreewith everything I am saying. If you do, you are not the antibourgeois, anticapitalist,or antiethical reader I am trying to persuade. I need to persuadeyou that capitalism and bourgeois virtues have been greater forces eliminatingpoverty than any labor union or welfare program or central plan. Wehave the eight-hour day mainly because we got rich, and therefore we won’ttolerate eleven-hour days—unless we are yuppie attorneys in New Yorkfresh from Yale Law School making well over $100,000 a year in exchangefor a seventy-seven-hour work week. Some poor people now work longhours and can’t make it. No one should deny that. But it was worse in 1900,and worse yet in 1800. Better working conditions have prevailed not becauseof union negotiations or governmental regulations, but because capitalismhas worked.I need to persuade you also that, contrary to Colquhoun, poverty is nota most necessary ingredient in society. I need to show you empirically, forexample, and will try in volume 4, what most economists know: that if theallegedly exploitative trade of the first world with the third were haltedtomorrow the first world would suffer a mere hiccup in its rate of growth.I need to show you empirically that if presently poor people in rich countriesall became engineers and professors, the presently rich people wouldbe better off, not worse off, though with fewer poor people to bus the tablesand mind the children.We will not have the heaven-on-earth of perfect equality, ever, andI lament this fact. But equality over the long term—despite an unhappyreversal in the trend in the United States in the 1980s—has been increasedby capitalism, and in absolute terms the poor even in the 1980s and after gotbetter and better off.