The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

34 apologyThe claim on the left is that “the first person who, having enclosed a plotof land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simpleenough to believe him, was the true founder of political society. Whatcrimes ...would the human race have been spared had someone pulled upthe stakes . . . and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen tothis imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belongto all!’ ” 74 In 1755 it was not unreasonable of Rousseau to focus onlandownership. But to focus on the original appropriation is a mistake in aprogressing economy. The philosopher David Schmidtz explains the economicsagainst Rousseau: “Philosophers ...tend to speak as if people whoarrive first ...are much luckier than those who come later....Consider theJamestown colony of 1607. Exactly what was it, we should ask, that madetheir situation so much better than ours? They never had to worry aboutbeing overcharged for car repair. ...They never had to agonize over thechoice of long-distance phone companies. Are these the things that makeus wish we had gotten there first?” 75Today in places like Europe and the United States the share of incomeearned from all the original and indestructible powers of the soil is, I say,below 3 percent. 76 Even in overheated, supercooled, and gas-guzzling Americawe earn only about 4 percent of our national income from crude oil,reckoned at the well head or the point of importation. And only part of the4 percent is an income to the land involved. Much of it is the income ofroughnecks and drill bits and oil tankers, not the oil land itself. Thereforethe oil geopolitics which so fascinates deep thinkers—besides being sociallycruel and politically shortsighted and militarily impractical—is economicallysilly.The real danger comes from assaults on the human capital that madeland scarcity irrelevant in the first place. We can pollute Lake Erie. In fact,we did. During the 1960s every environmentalist declared with angry assurancethat Erie was biologically dead forever, kaput, finite, over. And yet inthe 1990s we can bring it back for fishing and swimming, and did, if we haveour wits about us.If we have our wits about us we can in the next fifty years use up theoil in the Middle East and yet replace it in automobiles and heating withhydrogen. We can drain the Oglala aquifer in the next twenty years, andyet one day replenish it—mad thought—from desalinized seawaterpiped to Nebraska using that cheap and clean hydrogen fuel, if we have