Interesting mini-essay at Lew Rockwell this weekend. Link. Excerpt:
"What no one expected," said a colleague the other day, "was the way capitalism and communism get along in the modern world."
People thought the two ideas were mutually exclusive. As recently as the Reagan administration, people with brains thought there would have to be a showdown... that the two ideologies could not live together; the world wasn't big enough for them both. But look what has happened. Today's the most dynamic economy on the planet ”“ one with what appears to be the most freewheeling capitalism ”“ is in a communist country, China.
And in America, which is supposed to be a "capitalist" nation, practically everything is regulated, collectivized and subsidized ”“ especially in the economic sphere. Even when people eat too much and become fat, they blame McDonald's... or the government... or society for their own obesity. Everything requires permission from some group... and when things go wrong, it's always the fault of some group. Individual responsibility is disappearing.
Hilaire Belloc looked ahead and described the modern world back in 1912:
"The future of industrial society... is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed... by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile."
People lose their independence. But so what? According to Belloc, they are "inclined to the acceptance of [their servile status] by the positive benefits it confers."
We're reminded of Joseph Pearce's words about Solzhenitsyn's opinion of these economic systems: "If Bolshevism was a bully, capitalism was a cad." Both systems obsess themselves with the material world, which is why JPII and Solzhenitsyn identified consumerism as one of the West's biggest problems. Capitalism's approach is far (far, far) better at delivering prosperity, but in extreme forms, it's still materialistic, just like Marxism.
Don't get us wrong. Capitalism has further significant advantages over communism, including but not limited to the right to worship and the right to involve oneself minimally in a capitalistic system. It might be difficult to pursue non-material goods due to the social pressures brought to bear by the mass markets, but it is legal, which is saying a lot.
Anyway, we've strayed a bit from the Lew Rockwell writer's point, which is that the welfare state in America has begun to resemble communism and communism has begun to resemble the free market, but it's all tied together--by a materialism that lacks proper respect for the spiritual world.
