The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

484 chapter 46Now if the market deal is a cheat, then of course the victim is not benefited.But it’s mainly outsiders to the business world, not insiders, who think thata lot of money is to be made by cheating. P. T. Barnum, John Mueller pointsout, did not say, ever, that a “sucker is born every minute.” Nothing like it.On the contrary, Mueller explains, Barnum and the Ringling Brothers rescuedthe circus industry from extinction by offering the customers a novelty—honest,inexpensive entertainment. They patrolled their grounds withdetectives, for example, instead of encouraging pickpockets to strip therubes. They hired interesting acts instead of hiring “Monday men” to robthe customers’ houses when they were at the circus. Mueller quotes GeorgeAde on the nineteenth-century circus kings: they “found the business in thehands of vagabonds and put it into the hands of gentlemen.” 9 Well ...“gentlemen”by an American and nineteenth-century and bourgeois definition.Profit is seldom a con game. Not in a bourgeois society.True, if I buy low and sell high I get the profit. At any rate I get it untilmore buyers-low turn up and spoil my game, turning the former profit intoa gain to consumers from our competition in a proliferation of HomeDepots and Costcos and T.J. Maxxes, or of Microsofts and Yahoos andGoogles. But I earn the profit because of a scarce virtue I have, my “alertness,”as the economist and rabbi Israel Kirzner puts it. 10 One could also callit “ judgment” (gnomē), as Aristotle did, and ally it with phronēsis, practicalwisdom. It is a virtue which is good for me, to be sure. But it is also good forother people.We want to encourage such alertness/judgment/phronēsis/enterprise, forthe same reason we want to encourage Thomas Edisons and Albert Einsteins.I alertly notice what for its best use should be moved from one person toanother, that is, moved to its highest-valued use. Profit comes from noticingthat people might want to buy the works of the reformed graffiti sprayerKeith Haring. It doesn’t come from routine deals—simply because “routine”means “the competitors have entered,” and supernormal profits are no longerto be gained. Barnum noticed that people wanted what was described as a“Sunday-school” approach to circuses, and so he provided it, movingresources from pickpocketing to high wire acts. What’s the beef?The beef was well expressed on the eve of the new bourgeois ideology byLouis Thomassin, a French theologian of the late seventeenth century,“a plain man of stupendous erudition,” who among other tasks in hisposthumous multivolume Traités historiques et dogmatiques of 1697 attacked