The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

480 chapter 46Why finish high school, why acquire skills on a building site, when you canearn a workingman’s yearly income in a week of bold smuggling?“Real wealth” in the economist’s way of thinking is not a pile of finishedstuff merely to be allocated, as in the children’s playroom. Nor does wealthconsist of those tokens of ownership such as money in your pocket or stocksin your pension plan or profits from your drug deal. Wealth is the real abilityin arm or brain or machine to produce more stuff, the “real” backing forthe tokens. The recovery of Europe from the Second World War did notdepend, as popular fable has it, on the U.S. of A. and the Marshall Plan, graciousthough the gesture of the plan was. The plan was the equivalent ofabout one year of private European investment: very welcome, but not thewhole story. Recovery depended chiefly on European arms and brains, theirreal wealth. That the bricks had been toppled by bombs was only a temporarysetback. 3The real wealth behind your pension is the ability in arm or brain ormachine of employed labor or capital, that is, your kids’ generation payingwith their abilities in production your Medicare bills. Who owns the streamof disposable income from the real wealth is a separate matter. If the governmenthas plausibly promised to tax your kids to pay for your health care,you in a sense own that stream of income. But anyway the real wealth of thenation as a whole—you and the kids together—is the productive power ofthe economy, not the promises on tongue or paper.Private property and unfettered exchange—in a phrase, modern capitalism—is not the kingdom of heaven, Lord knows. But for allocating scarcegoods and especially for making more of them, well . . . it is the worst system,except for all those others that have been tried from time to time. Andits ethical effect, I have been arguing, is by no means entirely bad. JamesBoyd White declares that “the market economy . . . is really a system of dominanceand acquisition....[It shows] the acquisitive values and calculatingbehavior of the economic sphere.” 4 No, it is not, except in the minds ofhardnosed if deluded theorists on the right from Machiavelli to RichardPosner. For one thing, the market is embedded socially and ethically. Foranother, no other system has been more free from dominance, acquisition,and calculating behavior. A dollar is a dollar, and a poor man has as muchclaim to its value as a rich man. No dominance there, and less than in a societyof aristocratic status or Socialist Party membership. Anyway, namethe society that has ever actually existed that has not been dominated by