Truth or Dare

In the midst of reading “The Wealth of Nations” the whole field of economic thought has become so appealing I have briefly and cursorily detoured to Locke, Veblen, Marx, Mises, Hayek, and Friedman among others. As a result I have gathered an un-scholarly general impression of the scope of the subject. Consequently, the stochastic processes of the economic universe, together with living experience, have impacted my layman’s mind and have caused me to question the pontifications of politicians no more qualified than I, and with motivations more dubious.

I am often confronted with capitalist truisms and sanctified conservative maxims bearing little relevance to the multitude of factors at the foundation of the economic edifice. There is such a dedicated belief in ideology that pragmatism itself is suspect. And Adam Smith, in my reading thus far, was a pragmatic observer of his world, willing to expose both the virtues and evils of capital. If I have gained any edification or confirmation of my intellectual prejudices, I must confess my opinion that capitalism is not such a perfected machine that it can run on auto-pilot. If the betterment of human society is desired human hands, perceiving human realities, and the consequences of action and inaction, must be at the controls. It is against the impulse of human evolution and rise from barbarism to abandon the great magnitude of the human condition to the intellectual or material auspices of the temporarily advantaged. The God of self-interest is the natural enemy of the interests of all others, and un-remediated by the non-savagery of community interests only ultimately causes reversion to barbarism with statutory cover.

The reasons for the current predicament of this nation, formerly the bastion and exemplar of laissez-faire capitalism, will not be discovered in esoteric mathematical formulae, or the graphing of non-deterministic exogenous or endogenous business cycles, or prosecutions for blasphemous ideological heterodoxy. It will be found in the intellectual non-exertions of a culture formerly comfortable in the hubris of fortunate circumstances, worshiping a petrified God with clay feet in a muddy world.