Capitalism is Dignity

I used to ascribe to the school of thought that Capitalism, in its irrefutable virtues, needed no defense. If only that were still true. Avowed communists have penetrated the Executive Branch. The President has advocated for wealth redistribution on multiple occasions--famously with Joe the Plumber in '08.  Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is Roger Cohen, who apparently believes that the weakness of governments in India demands a stronger government here. (Yes, it's exactly that asinine.)

This piece is a call-to-arms for the institution of neo-Communism in the United States. More government. Less freedom. More toilets. Less cell phones. I realized about half-way through that I was no longer being funny. In truth, there’s not much to make light of in this article. These may be some of the most dangerous, and brutally honest ideas expressed by the left: Capitalism is broken. Trust us to fix it. Stop asking how.

TOILETS AND CELLPHONES by Roger Cohen 

NEW YORK — I was intrigued to learn the other day that there are now more cellphones in India than toilets. 

There’s an ap for that?!?

Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, 

Not too long ago, the United Nations teamed up with One Laptop Per Child as a means to distribute information to children to bridge the information divide between rich and poor nations. Now, all of a sudden, technology is indefensible when developing countries decide they want to spend their own money on it?
I suddenly feel very foolish for seizing upon Krystof’s article on Sunday. Instead of using the revelation of atrocious spending patterns among the poor as an impetus to reassess the merits of our poverty programs and subsidies, liberals are going to use them as an excuse to regulate or tax behavior with which they disagree in the name of the public good.

while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study. 

I trust United Nation studies about as much as I trust Barry Bonds' comments on BALCO. Even so, the dearth of public sanitation works should be a local governmental issue, not a federal governmental issue. If the funding has to go through the central Indian government, I don't blame Indians for prioritizing their spending away from public works.

This can be seen as skewed development favoring private networks over the public good. 

By private networks, does he mean private citizens? This is asinine. Neither investment is equivalent in cost or benefit, so the comparison is, itself, skewed.

It can be seen as an example of markets outstripping governments: 

It can also be seen as a reflection of the relative costs of building a nationwide network of plumbing and sewage pipes beneath a third world country that is overpopulated and overburdened by squalor. More likely, though, it’s a reflection of the minuscule marginal cost of adding a new cell phone user to an existing infrastructure. In either event, it’s in no way comparing apples to apples. 

Besides, Who doesn’t want markets to “outstrip” governments?

Nimble cellphone companies 

Only someone who’s never called tech support at AT&T or Verizon could be so colossally naive as to call telecommunications companies nimble.

profit 

Profit is good, no?

while lumbering Indian authorities 

This is an article in support of the “lumbering authorities.” When any institution is "lumbering" compared to the "nimble" multibillion dollar multinational telecommunications conglomerates, it's time to increase the expectations; most people don't like making bonfires out of money.

are unable even to stop the propagation of water-borne disease through defecation in the open. 

I can solve half of India’s water-borne disease problems right now: “Attention Indians: don’t shit where you eat (or drink). That is all.” Someone translate that into Hindi and get me a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Or it can be seen merely as the choice Indians have made about their priorities. 

Again, the choice is: a) buy a cell phone, or b) demand that the government loot the money you was going to spend on a cell phone and inefficiently build toilets 500 miles away while simultaneously damaging the entire consumer economy by sucking cash out of consumer's pockets.

What is certain is that those half-billion Indians with cellphones — and they will be a billion within the next decade 

Growth is good, no?

— have begun to inhabit parallel universes. 

I’m not a physicist, but I’m pretty sure not even the existence of parallel universes is certain.

There is their 

Note to the author: don't put homonyms in such close proximity. It's both lazy sentence composition and a grating stylistic choice.

mental community, perhaps including regular contact with far-flung family members in London or Louisville. 

What does “there” refer to? What the hell is a mental community? The people living inside your head?

Then there is their 

Even more grating!

physical community, with its tattered village poverty and bureaucratic inertia. 

Of course, there are also world-class cities in India. Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore come to mind. Also, those aren’t parallel universes. They’re not even different hemispheres.

Texts fly. Sanitation dies. 

Bumper sticker!

In some measure this duality is the modern condition. 

Oh Jesus…

It brings an attendant schizophrenia about the state and government. 

He’s going to make a simple point and act like it's profound, isn’t he?

On the one hand people who are increasingly autonomous 

Read: dangerous.

— linked globally through technology, able to choose their own real or virtual gated communities, 

Read: closeted racist bloggers.

Outstripping 

This is the second time he’s used “outstripping” this column. I don’t think he knows what it means.

controls and taxes 

“Excelling beyond” controls and taxes is a good thing, no?

in their frenzied networking 

That clause makes absolutely no sense. This is starting to feel like a rant.

— feel contemptuous of the government and the state. 

And there it is. The asinine revelation he’s been driving towards: autonomous people feel resentful of overbearing authorities meddling in their lives. Any teenager in the country could tell you that.

As Mark Lilla has noted in The New York Review of Books of America’s Tea Party movement, 

Boy, that sounds like a credible document.

a toddler-tantrum 

I thought they were all old white guys…oh I see what you’re doing here…

expression of individualism run amok, 

First, the lack of specificity of his references implies that Lilla’s The New York Review of Books is the “toddler-tantrum.” Secondly, I realize that the phrase has gone mainstream, but amok literally means “murderous frenzy.” Get off the idea that the Tea Party is violent, because it’s just not true.

they have “only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.” 

The Tea Party has many things to say about the overreach of the federal government into the lives of private citizens. Individuals within the Tea Party have many more things to say; they are usually educated, opinionated people. The message is clear and succinct because it is a rallying cry. Tea Partiers have flocked to this statement because whatever your feelings on abortion, gay marriage, or school vouchers, the most important issue in American politics throughout the course of the nation’s history has been the extent to which government has the right to intervene in our lives.

Far from Cohen’s assertions, the GOP has proven to be a diverse hotbed of intellectual disagreements and debate. Just look at Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Right Act. Paul is absolutely right when he says that the Civil Rights Act has limited the Constitutional right to free assembly by imposing race-based requirements upon both individual citizens and businesses. There is an entirely legitimate debate to be had whether or not the government can—in accordance with the Constitution—or morally should, enforce positive liberties on the populace. There are valid points to be made on both sides. Not surprisingly, however, this entire discussion is happening on the right.

On the other, aware that our globalized little earth has come very close of late to complete financial meltdown 

Caused by government overreach.

and is still hovering near the brink, noting that there are drawbacks when mere anarchy 

It’s a pretty big jump to say that the Tea Parties support anarchy.

is loosed upon the world, perhaps even glimpsing that shared institutions 

Like businesses, religious and community organizations, and private charities, for example?

are essential to any society, 

Is this sentence still going? Yawn.

people clamor in moments of crisis for the reviled state to step in and save them. 

No, YOU clamor. We work together without government. Look at liberal New Orleans’ collapse into looting and anarchy during Katrina versus the productive collaborative effort during the flooding in heavily conservative Tennessee this spring.

Or at least save the homes bought with the very financial instruments they now decry. 

That isn't how derivatives work. At all.

At some dim level the words of John Stuart Mill still resonate: “The idea is essentially repulsive of a society only held together by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interests.” 

The alternatives: a) communism, where society is held together by the relations and feelings arising out of a common class, b) fascism, where a society is held together by the relations and feelings arising out of nationalism, or c) despotism, where a society is held together by fear. I don’t find capitalism repulsive at all. After all, our “pecuniary interests” are the clearest reflection of our personal values.

But that’s the kind of idea — and the kinds of societies — that have tended to dominate over the past two decades. 

Pesky reality keeps getting in the way of progress!

The great leaps forward of China and India came after the immense post-war Social Democratic and Christian Democratic achievements in Europe had begun to be taken for granted. 

You mean, the “achievements” that are dismantling the cohesion of the federal governments as we speak in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain?

After 1989, people were more inclined to attack the cumbersome welfare state than recognize how social entitlements and neo-Keynesian economics have insured the Continent against renewed fracture. 

Except that in the 21 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europeans have continued to expand entitlements across the very same continent that’s descending into nation-fracturing riots because it can’t afford the entitlement programs it enacted.

China and India grew to the beat of a globalized

Globalization is a late-90s idea

get-rich-quick generation

I assume this is an allusion to the post-Gen-X children that came of age in the 00's.

and financial masters of the universe

This is a reference to Bonfire of the Vanities, which was a critique of the 1980's.

rather than social responsibility.

 Seriously, which VH1 show do I have to add third world growth to? I Love the 80's, I Love the 90's, or I Love the New Millennium?

The consequences are now before them. 

More wealth? Increased foreign direct investment? Blossoming trade agreements? Massive industrial development? Improved prospects for every citizen? Massive infrastructure improvements compared with neighbors?

In post-Cold War Europe — with Thatcherism still resonating,

He used resonating again. This guy really falls in love with certain words.

a market-knows-best consensus spreading, 

Speaking of parallel universes, I think Cohen has finally found one where Europe actually believes in free markets.

and the loss of the common purpose that came with having a common enemy — political and social cohesion eroded. 

No, the attempts to hybridize socialism with capitalism—despite the demonstrable failure of the great socialist experiment in the Soviet Union—eroded social cohesion and unfettered immigration from Islamic cultures diluted national identities across the continent.

The crisis of the euro today is in many ways a crisis of stalled integration. 

If there is anything we can be absolutely certain that the crisis of the Euro today is NOT, it is the “crisis of stalled integration.” It is a crisis of divergent cultures that never should have tried integration in the first place. It is the crisis of farming out responsibilities of the domestic government to international organizations. It is a crisis of governing monetary policy without accountability to the citizenry.

The common currency was supposed to be the capstone of a united Europe, 

The last time Europe had a common currency, it was gold. How’d that social cohesion work out?

in turn 

At best, these are two absolutely wasted words.

the ultimate insurance against 20th-century horror, but instead came into being just as the European ideal 

if there is a singular European ideal, they wouldn’t need currency as a mechanism of artificial social cohesion.

fell victim to easy-money hedonism, 

Is that a euphemism for debt?

consumerism, 

Is that a euphemism for debt?

atomization 

The creation of the European Union was anything but atomizing.

and anti-immigrant populism. 

What? A backlash against immigrants was more socially destructive than the influx of non-native cultures that refused to assimilate?

It remains to be seen whether the euro’s plight can revive any convictions about the shared European governance necessary to sustain it. 

Nothing says “give it more money” to a liberal like abject failure.

In the United States, the rapid growth of the Tea Party movement represents what Lilla calls a “populist insurgency” 

This is absolute gibberish. How can a populist movement be insurgent in a republic? Wouldn’t the uprising of the populace indicate that the government has been insurgent to the consent of the governed, and not the other way around?

against government and regulations in virtually all forms. It’s the “politics of the libertarian mob.” 

The Tea Party has been about as violent as Gandhi. It’s time to drop the “mob” moniker.

Yet this mob 

There it is again.

is driven in large part by fury over a financial implosion whose root lay in a murky universe of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that escaped all government control 

No. The anger is driven by a murky universe in which elected officials conspire to stay in office by forcing private institutions to give home loans to potential voters who have absolutely no financial merit to justify those loans. The fact that Wall Street came up with clever ways to package and redistribute this irrational risk exposure is a testament to the free market’s power to innovate and the government’s inability to deal with unintended consequences.

— and served in the end as a reminder that some problems are so big they do demand a collective response. 

You won’t find many in the Tea Party who think that TARP was a necessary or even productive government intervention. In fact, most fiscal conservatives effectively argue that government intervention in the banking industry is far more likely to prolong the recession, stunt any natural innovation in the banking industry’s credit monitoring mechanisms, and further entrench banking market share for the five or so major players still in the market.

This is the schizophrenia I alluded to above:

And that I already explained was bogus.

I want my freedom undiluted, and unhitched to responsibility, up and until the moment I need Big Brother to rescue me. 

An allusion to Orwell in an article that so clearly discounts both the need for precision of language and the evils of government interventionism is very unsettling to me.

We have entered what Tony Judt has called “an age of insecurity.” 

Insecurity rooted in the idea that merit no longer leads to success. That virtue has been divorced from praise. That freedom has been separated from business. That money has been stripped of its value. Insecurity that there are those who are going to destroy the last best hope for mankind because they desperately want to detach cause from effect and undo a world constrained by the unrelenting logic of existence.

By any measure, at least in the West, we are living a crisis of the market economy, 

We don’t have a market economy anymore. The crisis is driven by the explosion of extra-market influences.

or at least of the pure market-driven individualism (with the spiraling debt that accompanied it) 

Page 1 of the liberal playbook:
a) Taint an institution that is a philosophical bedrock of conservatives piece by piece by introducing pollutants
b) Insist that nothing has changed
c) Push the institution, weakened by pollutants, to the point of failure
d) Decry the failure of the institution
e) Expound that conservative principles are a failure
f) Repeat

that predominated in the first two decades of the post-Cold-War period. The binge has reached its limit and the tabs are in. 

Whose tabs? Capitalism’s? Here’s the beautiful thing about capitalism: it doesn’t run any tabs. It is a transactional system whereby each party agrees that a deal will be profitable towards their own ends, and agrees to absorb the risk of such a transaction. It is a system where risk sometimes leads to loss, but more often offers reward. It is a system that validates the virtues of individual liberty, and rewards the merit of the exceptional. It is a system of unassailable logic, and unrivaled historical success.

But some new balance between state and market, one that provides toilets as well as cellphones, awaits definition. 

Suggested definitions: Neo-Communism, Mommy-Communism, The Cult of the Collective, Social Progressivism, or Failure..

Dignity should not be incompatible with opportunity. 

Capitalism is the ultimate expression of dignity. When any man can rise to become the embodiment of his own childhood fantasies, when the only thing that separates man from greatness is his own ability, there can exist no indignity, only the certainty that the next day will be a new opportunity to be great.

We don’t need to look too far back in time to see the violent consequences of financial collapse and social disaggregation. 

Is what happened yesterday in Greece fare enough back?

The Garbo retreat is not an answer. 

You fucking idiot, of course it's an answer. You wouldn't have spent an entire article refuting it if you didn't think it was an answer. If I were to ask what two plus two is, and you said five, I wouldn't look at you and say "five isn't an answer." I'd smack you upside the head, say "four, you moron! Two plus two is four." Still, I'd acknowledge that five was an answer.

Private networks alone cannot salvage the commonweal. 

Much of our country's greatness lies in our certainty that wealth need not be common. Just as I don’t want my own wealth to become my neighbor’s, I can imagine no greater indignity than having his wealth become mine.After all, where does a man turn when his government decides to steal from him for the sake of someone else?