"The Fate of Capitalism"
"Capitalism – our ability to buy and sell, move money around as we wish, and to turn a profit by doing so – is in deep trouble. No doubt Smith, as he watches the collapse of Iceland and the Irish travails, is reconsidering his aphorism that little else is needed to create a prosperous state than “peace, easy taxes and tolerable administration of justice” – that did not work this time. By contrast, rumbles of satisfaction might be heard coming from Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery, causing excitement for the still considerable numbers of Chinese visitors. Meanwhile, Schumpeter will have due cause to mutter: “This is not a surprise, really.” As for Keynes, we might imagine him sipping tea with Wittgenstein at Grantchester meadows, pursing his lips at the incapacity of merely normal human beings to get things right: at our tendency to excessive optimism, our blindness to the signs of economic over heating, our proneness to panic – and our need, every so often, to turn to clever men like himself to put the shattered Humpty-Dumpty of international capitalism back together again.All these political economists instinctively recognised that the triumph of free-market forces – with the consequent elimination of older social contracts, the downgrading of the state over the individual, the end of restraints upon usury – would not only bring greater wealth to many but could also produce significant, possibly unintended consequences that would ripple through entire societies. Laissez faire, laissez aller was not only a call to those chafing under medieval, hierarchical constraints; it was also a call to unbind Prometheus. Logically, it both freed you from the chains of a pre-market age, and freed you to the risks of financial and social disaster. In the place of Augustinian rules came Bernie Madoff opportunities. By the same instinctive reasoning, most sensible governments since Smith’s time have taken precautions against citizens’ totally unrestricted pursuit of private advantage. States have invoked the needs of national security (therefore you must protect certain industries, even if that is uneconomic), the desire for social stability (therefore do not allow 1 per cent of the population to own 99 per cent of its wealth and thus provoke civil riot), and the common sense of spending upon public goods (therefore invest in highways, schools and fire-brigades). In fact, with the exception of the few absurdly communist states such as North Korea, all of today’s many political economies lie along a recognisable spectrum of more-free-market versus less-free-market arrangements.
But what has happened over the past decade or more is that many governments let down their guard and allowed nimble, profit-seeking individuals, banks, insurance companies and hedge funds much greater scope to create new investment schemes, leverage more and more capital on the basis of increasingly thin real resources and widen dramatically the pool of gullible victims (silly, under-earning individuals, hopeful not-for-profits, Jewish charities, friends of a friend of an investment manager, the list is long), thereby creating our own era’s spectacular equivalent of the South Sea Bubble. As in all such gigantic credit “busts”, many millions more people – the innocent as well as the foolish – will be hurt than the snake-oil salesmen and loan managers who perpetrated these so-called “wealth creation” schemes.
What, then, is capitalism’s future? Our current, damaged system is not, despite Marx’s hopes, to be replaced by a totally egalitarian, communist society (such arrangements might be there in life after death). Our future political economy will probably not be one in which Smith or his present-day disciples could find much comfort: there will be a higher than welcome degree of government interference in “the market”, somewhat larger taxes and heavy public disapprobation of the profit principle in general. Schumpeter and Keynes, one suspects, will feel rather more at home with our new post-excess neocapitalist political economy. It will be a system where the animal spirits of the market will be closely watched (and tamed) by a variety of national and international zookeepers – a taming of which the great bulk of the spectators will heartily approve – but there will be no ritual murder of the free-enterprise principle, even if we have to plunge further into depression for the next years. Homus Economicus will take a horrible beating. But capitalism, in modified form, will not disappear. Like democracy, it has serious flaws – but, just as one find faults with democracy, the critics of capitalism will discover that all other systems are worse. Political economy tells us so."
Paul Kennedy is professor of history and director of International Security Studies at Yale University, is the author/editor of 19 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Vintage). He is writing an operational history of the second world war. To join the debate go to www.ft.com/capitalismblog
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