The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the rich 479before capitalism had grown up. The labor theory of value, I report fromeconomics, is simply mistaken, as almost everyone agrees who has studiedthe question. 1But what about those darn capitalists and their grotesquely highincomes? Do I believe in good capitalists? My answer is like the old joke,“Do I believe in infant baptism? Goodness, I’ve seen it!” Do I believe in goodcapitalists? Goodness, I’ve seen them, for example, Lionel Rothschild,Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. The first, third, andfourth, by the way, were pious followers of an Abrahamic religion, as Jew,Episcopalian, and Baptist. And Carnegie was raised among such people.We have been told since the muckraking journalists of the early 1900s, orin another rich tradition the anti-Semites then and later, that these were justterrible men. I mean, how else did they get so rich? If you are inclined tothink this way, I suggest gently that you may have bought into a theory thatthe only way to get rich is by stealing. Zero-sum: your gain is my loss. Tillichand Wegener again: each person in a capitalist society “is the enemy of theother, because his advantage is conditioned by the disadvantage or ruin ofthe other.” Or Comte-Sponville: “Western prosperity depends, directly orindirectly, on Third World poverty, which the West in some cases merelytakes advantage of and in others actually causes.”In the playroom that’s true. Jip gets more toys—short of a subsidy fromMother—only by violence against Janneke. But such a theory is mistaken ina market economy, in which food and toys and other goods and services aremade afresh daily, not merely reallocated from a God-given stock. And it isthe more mistaken the more quickly the goods-making skills of the economyare growing. Free-market economies are positive sum.Economies grow slowly—or not at all—when stealing or taxing becomesimpler ways to wealth than working and selling. The stealing and taxes discourageproduction, and so the outcome is worse even than zero-sum. Suchnegative-sum alternatives to exchange have historically been the norm,which is one reason that sustained economic growth happened only once.According to Tacitus, the ancient German man thought it “tame and spiritlessto accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be gottenquickly by the loss of a little blood.” 2 In a society dominated by aristocrats,whether of the sword or the pen, manual work had little prestige. Along theHeroin Road from Afghanistan through Turkey to the streets of London,easy money gotten quickly by the loss of a little blood corrupts the young.