Crybaby capitalists

They've been bitching for years no one loves them. And now no one does!

I was thumbing through National Review and came across an article by Michael Strain — a particularly tedious “Reformicon” who thinks Republicans care about subtle tax policy alterations more than they love caging Mexican babies — called “Is Capitalism Broken?” and let me tell you, it was a real memory trip — by which I mean it was like stuff I’ve been reading for a thousand years in rightwing magazines about how some people think the free market isn’t so hot but stuff and nonsense, the Invisible Hand gives everyone a wank and some bastards are just too ungrateful to cum.

F’rinstance: Here’s me writing about a 2006 story at Tech Central Station — ha, remember that? — in which Lee Harris admitted grudgingly the allure of socialism for the peasants, because “who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?” and suggested with a straight face that capitalism needed a “transformative myth of its own” to lure suckers, I mean educate the citizenry that red is dead and Reagan rules. Harris obviously thought it unfair that “work or starve (but maybe grow rich!)” didn’t inspire respect among the proles.

For years the brethren have kept trying to make capitalism sound noble. We had crackpots like The Anchoress saying shit like “We would not have toilets if a capitalist had not taken a chance, held his breath and flushed.” When miners were rescued from a cave-in in Chile, conservatives cried, “Thank capitalism!” (Never mind capitalism sent them down the pit to get trapped in the first place.) The goofier libertoids created Invisible Hand stroke books like Capitalism magazine, and explained fire departments that refused to save the burning homes of people who didn’t pay ackshually made us all more free.

And still they cried because no one found them inspiring, lovable, or sexy, and moped that it just wasn’t fair, and wrote plaints like “How ‘Monopoly’ Perpetuates Myths About Capitalism,” and brooded in the Randian aeries.

I always wondered why they gave a shit. Capitalism is just what is — it’s the system we’re stuck with because the bosses want it and the cops and soldiers make sure they get what they want. So why did these guys care that a bunch of hippies preached an alternate creed? They’d done a great job of marginalizing them for a century or more.

Maybe they knew something I didn’t, or maybe just had guilty consciences, or maybe had the special sensitivity of certain animals that can hear storms coming well before the first ill wind blows. Whatever it is, you can see in the past few years that socialism is getting a fresh look, and capitalism, the depredations of which grow harder to ignore or excuse with each GoFundMe plea for life-saving medical treatment and each geezer working into his 70s or 80s because he can't afford to retire — is so despised, not just unloved but despised, that the Koch brothers are directing their money hose at the Democrats to get them to choose more centrist candidates.

And here we have Strain, at the short version at National Review and the long version at the Guardian, telling whoever reads such things that it doesn’t matter how bad your personal experience of capitalism might be, his slide rule says we have high workforce participation — never mind that for many that means juggling two or three shitty, benefit-free jobs — and income inequity is falling “once government transfer payments and federal taxes are taken into account,” which is like telling a drowning man that compared to the souls on the Andrea Doria he’s dry as a bone.

And in the City Journal spring issue there’s a thing called “How To Talk to Millennials About Capitalism” that’s just as embarrassing as it sounds. There’s actually a section in which author Edward L. Glaeser says kids “should be open to the notion that private-sector energy, not government control, opens a better path to widespread employment, less expensive housing, and superior medical care” because “Apple’s iPod arrived when they were nine, enabling them to listen to a library of music that they could carry in their pocket. The iPhone appeared in 2007, just in time to turbocharge their teenage social life…” Yes, you thought only drunk uncles and Megan McArdle thought Apple made millennials consider capitalism kewl — in fact I thought all the wingnuts had moved on to “You [slagged capitalism] on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha.”

You try and figure: Who would be convinced by this? And you realize that no one who isn’t already convinced would take it seriously for a second. These guys are just repeating praise of capitalism like a paternoster as the door splinters and the walls tremble. Well, couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys!