The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 47relatively poor taxpayer and gives to the relatively rich college student. Therelatively rich, after all, as Guest notes, send more of their kids to college.Those who have the gold, rule. In logic it need not have this regressive effect.If tuitions were raised for the rich—for example, the median voter in a richcountry or the predatory class in a poor country—and “scholarships” (thatis, price breaks) given to the poor, it would not. But in the political world weactually have it works in the regressive way. No one who understands themedian voter theorem, or governmental predation, should be surprised.I don’t suppose you are open to persuasion that in consequence of theway politics actually works the American farm program, say, benefits notpoor farmers but big farmers with access to senators in farm states—thussugar quotas and cotton price supports. Or that restrictions on the practiceof medicine and limitations on the power of prescription impoverish andsicken poor patients. Or that shop laws and planning permission in Britainand Holland raise the rental incomes of rich High Street or Hoogstraatlandlords at the expense of mothers holding badly paying jobs.All right. We can agree to disagree. But I beg you for your own sweetgood not to flee unthinkingly to the other extreme, which regards everyproblem as an occasion for more state coercion and more corporate welfareand more governmental transfers to the median voter or to the country clubbuying her vote. We ride the back of a tiger when we give the VladimirVladimirovich Putins of our world more power. We damage the poor toboot. I beg you to consider that there might be such a thing as bourgeoisvirtues, the modern freedoms, and that letting people alone to make dealsin a law-respecting society with low taxes helps them and their poor neighborsto flourish, materially and ethically, as Western Europe did 1600 to thepresent, increasingly bourgeois. “It seems safe to say,” writes Joseph Ellis celebratingin 2000 the founding brothers of the American republic, “thatsome form of representative government based on the principle of popularsovereignty and some form of market economy fueled by the energies ofindividual citizens have become the commonly accepted ingredients fornational success.” 115 Yes, it seems safe to say.In The Origins of Virtue (1996), Matt Ridley “glimpses . . . a better way,. . . a society built upon voluntary exchange of goods, information, fortuneand power between free individuals in small enough communities for trustto be built. I believe such a society could be more equitable, as well as moreprosperous, than one built on bureaucratic statism.” 116 So do I, and admire