The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

52 apologybombers. Europe recovered after its two twentieth-century hot wars mainlythrough its own efforts of labor and investment, not mainly through government-to-governmentcharity such as Herbert Hoover’s Commission orGeorge Marshall’s Plan. Government-to-government foreign aid to thethird world has enriched tyrants, not helped the poor.The importation of socialism into the third world, even in the relativelynonviolent form of Congress Party Fabian-Gandhism, unintentionally stifledgrowth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor. Thecapitalist-sponsored Green Revolution of dwarf hybrids was opposed bygreen politicians the world around, but has made places like India selfsufficientin grains. State power in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa hasbeen used to tax the majority of farmers in aid of the president’s cousinsand a minority of urban bureaucrats. State power in many parts of LatinAmerica has prevented land reform and sponsored disappearances. Stateownership of oil in Nigeria and Mexico and Iraq was used to support theparty in power, benefiting the people not at all. Arab men have been keptpoor, not bettered, by using state power to deny education and driver’slicenses to Arab women. The seizure of governments by the clergy has corruptedreligions and ruined economies. The seizure of governments by themilitary has corrupted armies and ruined economies.Industrial policy, from Japan to France, has propped up failing industriessuch as agriculture and small-scale retailing, instead of choosing winners.Regulation of dismissal has led to high unemployment in Germany andDenmark. In the 1960s, public-housing high-rises in the West inspired by LeCorbusier condemned the poor in Rome and Paris and Chicago to holdingpens. In the 1970s, the full-scale socialism of the East ruined the environment.In the 2000s, the “millennial collectivists,” red, green, or communitarian,oppose a globalization that helps the poor but threatens trade unionofficials, crony capitalists, and the careers of people in Western nongovernmentalorganizations. 125All these experiments of the twentieth century were arranged by governmentsagainst bourgeois markets. All of them were disasters. In short, theneoaristocratic, cryptopeasant, proclerisy, antibourgeois theories of thenineteenth century, applied during the twentieth century for taxing, fixing,resisting, modifying, prohibiting, collectivizing, regulating, unionizing,ameliorating, expropriating modern capitalism, failed of their purposes,killed many millions, and nearly killed us all.