The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 35our wits about us. The modern world is different from a zero-sumworld, which Malthus theorized just as it was disappearing forever. Wecan keep on innovating, keep up the factor of 8.5 or 19. If we have ourwits about us. 77Responding to the real danger threatening our future, I argue, requiresattention to human freedom. It is human freedom which has given us thewits to prosper. This again is not obvious, but volume 2 will try to show thatit is true.A bright future for human freedom therefore requires curbing our presentlords. These are not the corporations, which after all control only ourconsumption of hamburgers and athletic shoes, and, in view of their competition,“control” even those feebly, McDonald’s against Burger King orNike against New Balance. Observe that the terrible corporate trusts of earliertimes, such as the great and imposing United States Steel, the horrificAmalgamated Copper Company, the appalling American Telephone andTelegraph Company, the gouging Erie and New York Central railway pools,are one with Nineveh and Tyre.A farmer-captured Department of Agriculture, though, and a corruptUnited States Congress live on and on and on. At the end of 2004 the growersof taste-free little machine-harvested tomatoes in Florida were able toblock the exportation from the state of ugly but delicious handpicked varietiesby using the governmental system of “marketing orders” first promulgatedas a New Deal measure in 1937. When American steel producers gettariffs or when sugar beet growers get import quotas it is not because oftheir market power but because of their political power, their access to anall-powerful state.The ongoing danger to freedom, in other words, is from the powers ofthe modern state. Its powers have been justified, ironically, by the allegedneed to protect us from the monopoly of United States Steel, say, or fromthe low price of world sugar, or from terrorists provoked by the same government’sadventures in oil geopolitics.It has long been so. Adam Smith warned in 1776 against imperial adventuresand against the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers.“The interest of the dealers . . . in any particular branch of trade or manufacturesis always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, thatof the public.” 78 What’s good for General Motors is not, in general, good forthe generality.