Beyond Economic Man

Reading Dr. David Gordon's review of the fairly popular book Crunchy Cons by Mr. Rod Dreher over at Taki's Magazine is what encouraged me to type up this blog entry. The objective of this entry is to address what I believe are some confusions in what we can call the "anti-capitalist wing" of traditional or paleo- conservatism.

Life is More than the Market

It is not uncommon to find among some traditional conservatives the creating of caricatures when they identify advocates of a free market economy. They depict supporters of laissez-faire as genuinely believing that all of life is "economic." That market supporters think there is nothing more to life than "economics" and that life is nothing but a seeking of "maximum utility" in the workforce.

Of course, no advocate of a purely free market really believes that. One does not find Ludwig von Mises even remotely saying that man acts for money profit alone, or anything of that sort; on the contrary.

It is said that conservatism hates "terrible simplifiers." Frequently this is justifiably so. I'm with them. When looking at most schools of thought in economics it almost appears that they truly view man as a so-called "economic man" who seeks, like some kind of drone or robot, greater and greater money in his life and nothing else. The Austrian school of economics, in contrast, rejects the existence of the "economic man" because it views value as meaning more than the dollar sign. It understands that value derives from man's subjective preferences. That is to say, that value is not derived objectively through some equation but is determined in the minds of men. Because man acts for things that have nothing to do with buying or selling in the market place is a sign that man values non-monetary (non-"economic") things.

At the same time, though, the goal of an action which attempts to obtain a non-monetary satisfaction is still under and subject to the laws of economics. A man that acts towards such a goal is doing so because he, at the moment, thinks that end-goal is greater than other end-goals he could instead be acting or aiming towards. Hence acting always involves preferences. In addition, it involves costs because time is scarce. Doing X instead of Y costs not doing Y. Yet, even given this, this obviously does not parallel the silly caricatures that are created by those who are anti-market. There is nothing anti-conservative about Austrian economics. It does not at all imply, for example, that Church and family life is not part of the social order, or that it is "inefficient" to the social order.

Society and the Individual

Russell Kirk wrote that:

The cosmos of the libertarian is an arid loveless realm, a "round prison." "I am, and none else besides me," says the libertarian. "We are made for cooperation, like the hands, like the feet," replies the conservative, in the phrases of Marcus Aurelius. [The Essential Russell Kirk.]

"Mr. Libertarian," Murray Rothbard, would reply that this is an "authoritarian straw man." As an economist, he understood full well we are "made for cooperation, like the hands, like the feet." Neither did he understand that only in an "economic" sense. As Dr. Paul Gottfried writes in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, Rothbard had "characteristics linking him to a traditionalist conservative position." For instance, he had a "fierce defense of marriage and the family and [a] stated dislike for feminism."

Still, it is a grave mistake to put the "individual" and "society" at two opposite poles, as if they were antagonistic towards each other and incompatible with each other. "If the conflict," wrote Ludwig von Mises, "between the community interests of the whole and the particular interests of the individual really existed, men would be quite incapable of collaborating in society." In actual fact, the very idea of peace and civilization would be quite foreign to our minds if that conflict existed. A healthier society is a healthier individual, and vice versa.

There is another problem with this idea of conflict; although, this is particularly seen more with left-liberals than traditional conservatives. An individual conflicting with the collective is equally akin to varying collectives conflicting with each other and a collective itself having conflicts from within. As Mises said, collectivists rarely think about that and make a leap of faith that the "collective" will be astonishingly filled with no conflicts. Capitalism, instead, recognizes that interests, wants, and desires differ in society. That society is about variety; not leveling or pure conformity. (This is in agreement with Kirk's fifth principle of "Ten Conservative Principles.") Private property brings, versus top-down collective ownership, harmony between men who do not have the same exact needs and wants.

Because of the false idea that market supporters only support "the interests of particular people" versus the "public welfare" at large, Mises has said that "Capitalism [as a term] is better suited to be the antithesis of Socialism than Individualism."

And what we can call "conservative harmony" is produced in the market. Here is Mises:

[T]here is a tendency to forget that the physiological structure of mankind and the unity of outlook and emotion arising from tradition creates a far-reaching similarity of views regarding wants and the means to satisfy them. It is precisely this similarity of views which makes society possible. Because they have common aims, men are able to live together. [All Mises quotes are from Socialism.]

Indeed, tradition brings man a much needed stable environment to live and work in. It brings man a sense of belonging. Furthermore, as capitalism develops a diversified and complex division of labor, men become more interdependent on each other. It therefore, in a way, actually enervates (detached and isolated) "radical individualism." Correspondingly, as will be briefly argued below, capitalism encourages the development of "practical wisdom" and conservative "prejudices." They provide men a helpful guide in acting, i.e., in making good decisions.

The Family

Von Mises, far from thinking society is only made up of "economic men," described radical feminism as "a spiritual child of Socialism." He said that promoters of socialistic feminism do not confine themselves to supporting equality of law, as the classical liberals do, but wish to abolish the institution of marriage and family in a way which will "free" women of the inequalities they perceive as being produced through the social order of capitalism.

But they fight against reality, said Mises:

Pregnancy and the nursing of children claim the best years of a woman's life, the years in which a man may spend his energies in great achievements. ... It is clear that sex is less important in the life of man than of woman. ... Her destiny is completely circumscribed by sex; in man's life it is but an incident. ... It is not marriage which keeps woman inwardly unfree, but the fact that her sexual character demands surrender to a man and that her love for husband and children consumes her best energies. By "abolishing" marriage one would not make woman any freer and happier; one would merely take from her the essential content of her life, and one could offer nothing to replace it. ... All mankind would suffer if woman should fail to develop her ego and be unable to unite with man as equal, freeborn companions and comrades. To take away a woman's children and put them in an institution is to take away part of her life; and children are deprived of the most far-reaching influence when they are torn from the bosom of the family.

Feminists fight against natural inequalities which capitalism tries to nourish and direct for the good.

[Differences between men and women are not "social constructions"; read, e.g., Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven Rhoads.]

Mises in his Socialism book explained that "the principle of violence dominates" the sexual relationships of pre-capitalist times. The traditional and non-violent ideal of marriage today is a product of capitalism. It is where "marriage and love are united" together based on mutual consent and free will. Where there are equal legal rights. When "the principle of violence dominates," though, there is no mutual consent or free will. Polygamy is widespread in such a violent domain. On the other hand capitalism takes the ideal of monogamy, and mutual fidelity.

On top of this, this ideal, which free market capitalism promotes, is a weapon against prostitution----what Mises called "a remnant of ancient morals":

The most powerful influence against it today----the demand for man's abstinence outside marriage----is one of the principles involved in equal moral rights for man and woman, and is therefore altogether an ideal of the capitalist age.

The policies of socialism, according to Mises, work against the tendencies of capitalism. By socializing society and family functions, sexual promiscuity and "liberation" will be elevated. (As with many other things, I think it is safe to say that Mises was prophetic on what happens to family life when it is socialized, like it has been today to a great extent. Statistics are well-known in documenting the high number of broken families in today's day and age. It is a very sad thing to see. [Read, e.g., Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 by Charles Murray; Overcoming Welfare by James Payne; Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis by Allan Carlson; The Case for Marriage by Linda Waite & Maggie Gallagher.])

Why go into this? I do so because certain traditional conservatives have tried to portray capitalism as the enemy of the family. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not capitalism that has made it almost impossible for mothers of families in the middle class to be "stay-at-home-moms." Or that has made it difficult for adequate family and home investment. A wealthier, i.e. capitalistic, society can afford it. Fathers can earn wages without having almost half of their wealth being stolen directly (and indirectly) from the government.

Moreover, it is not capitalism but statism with civil "rights" and egalitarian "ideals" that have promoted the blurring of gender roles or differences. Various social engineering programs have further enhanced the present state of affairs. Affirmative action is one example. Government has also loosened the important bond of the nuclear family by other programs, for instance public education and subsidized childcare. It artificially, from the outside, as you might say, breaks family up and promotes feminism. The responsibility and importance of motherhood has thus been systematically attacked.

Accordingly, it is not incorrect to say that in so many ways government has literally taken (stolen) money away from families that raise their own children and given it (redistributed it) to those families who do not do so. That is, fiat has made it increasingly expensive for the traditional, natural family in comparison with the un-traditional, un-natural family. Clearly the consequence of such statism has been a pushed shift from the former to the latter.

The inheritance tax, for yet another example, is a direct attack on family. It makes families become less future orientated, and more unstable. The incentive to be good to your elders diminishes, since inheritance as an incentive to treat your elders well diminishes. It thus promotes disloyalty and bad behavior. Familial relationships, then, artificially loosen and breakup. These kinds of statists programs result in, in the individual family, less focus on family tradition and less overall family investment for the future. And, parenthetically, capital build-up in a society starts to correspondingly decline.

And with this Managerial State has come the Therapeutic State. The statist establishment pushes the idea of seeing traditional values as "bigoted," "sexist," and so on. Today we have what the late paleocon Sam Francis would call anarcho-tyranny.

Even the military (which is by definition a socialist enterprise), as family advocate Dr. Allan Carlson has shown, has engaged in massive social engineering when it comes to the family.

By the State weakening more constant and organic groups, which help provide a bulwark against advances from statist interventions (because they are natural outgrowths of civil society and are generally autonomous that live and breathe detached from the central government), its power increases vis-à-vis civil society. And from this, there is a systematic stimulation for a form of atomistic individualism that is detached from the attachments and bonds of civil society.

All of this should be expected in a statist society. It is in the interest of the State to engage in these destructive policies for a simple reason: the State can then fulfill its incentives of expanding itself.

A "Crunchy Con" Life

In 2006 Mr. Jeffrey Tucker over at the Mises Institute wrote a devastating review of Crunchy Cons and its economic nonsense.

It goes without saying that a man and his family that wishes to live a "crunchy con" life cannot do so without the ability to do so. The pre-capitalist era would not have the capability to have a population living life in such crunchy con luxury. When a crunchy con speaks ill of capitalism he bites the hand that feeds him. It is the market that allows people to live such a life.

While, as Mr. Tucker shows in his review, I think there are very serious problems with many of Mr. Dreher's ideas, this does not mean I do not agree with him on many other things. We all believe in the importance of social and cultural conservatism in general.

And, to note, the TAC issue (June 30) that focused on "culinary conservatism" I enjoyed very much. Mr. Dreher was in that issue. And on this blog I have voiced my support for Grace Before Meals.

Additionally, no thinking and spiritual man should applaud a life of pure materialism, consumerism, selfish egotism or narcissism, or childish hedonism.

The way crunchy cons want to see society organize around some of their principles and beliefs, nonetheless, is subject to question. Their view of capitalism as it relates to this topic is also subject to question.

Take for example healthy living. Obviously any rational man is supportive of healthy eating and living. However, high quality food, clean water, and high quality dietary vitamins are costly. Only when men have accumulated enough wealth in the market can the market then enter these lines of production. It is likewise for the construction of health clubs, gyms, or what have you. At first the outcome of these enterprise productions only the wealthy can afford. If an increasing number of men demand healthy food of this sort and other health products of this sort, entrepreneurs will see that there is great profit to make in these specialized industries and will thus enter them. As this happens the costs and prices will tend to go down and it will be easier for non-wealthy people to live a "crunchier" life.

It is (thankfully) true that under capitalism there is a tendency that the input costs involved in production lowers downwardly in competition. From this, however, it plainly does not follow that the quality of output in the form of consumer goods ready to be sold on the market lowers as well. The quality is based on consumer demand and can only be objectively identified as based on consumer demand. It is therefore subjectively determined from the frame of reference of consumers. Economically speaking, quality can only be determined based on this criterion, and this criterion alone. Based on this criterion, there is a capitalistic tendency that the output of goods to be sold on the market raises upwardly in competition. If a group of men do not like such a given criterion that currently exists in the minds of the public that consumes such-in-such good or goods, and are willing to pay for a business that works based on their respective criterion, then this opens up a hole that can be filled by the entrepreneur.

An added problem that many crunchy cons----not to mention many traditional conservatives in general----have is that all business should be local (or, at least, it should be close to this "ideal"). This is in contradiction to healthier and stronger living. It would produce poor conditions for family life. Community would be damaged more than helped in the long-run. One must understand that the market is about dividing up labor so as to increase wealth and prosperity. It is by comparative advantage that trade develops in a local and non-local sense. There is no dualism.  The logic is the same for all trade; just as the laws of arithmetic are true at all places and at all times.

Mises wrote:

It is clear that such an argument proceeds from the view that natural ownership in these means of production is undivided, and that only those benefit from them who have them physically. It does not realize that this view leads logically to the socialist doctrine with regards to the character of ownership in the means of production. For if it is wrong that Germans do not possess their own cotton plantations, why should it be right that every single German does not possess his coal mines, his spinning mill? Can a German call a Lorraine iron ore mine his any more when a German citizen possesses it than when a French citizen possesses it?

Then there is the argument that capitalism promotes incontinent hedonism and in so doing so disregards non-"economic" aspects of life. That it hurts the moral values of a people and that it results in surfeit. Mr. Samuel Gregg in The Commercial Society would argue otherwise. (See a review of this book here.) Many values that conservatives see important are presuppositions and reflections of a vibrant market economy. Civility, peace, restraint, tolerance, practical wisdom (prejudices), and trust are all characteristics of the "commercial society." (With tolerance, though, does come some needed intolerance against "bads.") In fact, all of these things become enhanced with capitalism as it increases social mobility beyond a privileged few. For instance, eleemosynary work can increase to a larger amount of people.

Gregg writes, for example:

Another feature of civility in commercial society is the quality of self-restraint. "Self-command," [Adam] Smith wrote, "is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre." The emphasis upon self-control flows, in part, from the realization that self-improvement in commercial orders requires much delayed gratification. ... In commercial society, the self-restraint associated with civility is closely linked to the pursuit of self-interest, self-improvement, and especially prosperity. It extends, for example, from entrepreneurs deferring much satisfaction if they are to accumulate the capital that they need for a loan, to those in a small business who need to work long and disciplined hours if their business is to grow significantly, to middle class property owners who voluntarily put aside considerable resources to fund their retirement or to help their children acquire the expensive education they need if they are to enhance their chances of success in a market order.

He continues:

The incentives for self-restraint in commercial society are thus more considerable and also accessible to larger numbers of people that any previous social order. Thus while it is true that in commercial society, as Helmut Kuzmics writes, "the society of the working bourgeois adopts the rituals of the courtly society," this is partly because manners and habits of politeness smooth the process of market exchange and the daily intensity of business and often become broadly associated with the achievement of prosperity.

And here is Max Weber:

The impulse to acquisition, the pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. ... This naïve conception of capitalism ought to be given up once and for all in the nursery school of cultural history. Unbridled avarice is not in the least the equivalent of capitalism, still less of its "spirit." [Quote from The Commercial Society.]

In actuality, it is through time that capitalism promotes the opposite qualities of "consumerism" and "materialism." In its place, capitalism through times promotes what are called "non-material," i.e., nonexchangeable, goods. To turn to Murray Rothbard, in Man, Economy, and State he praxeologically deduced that the "marginal utility of exchangeable goods tends to decline over time, while the marginal utility of nonexchangeable goods increases. ... [Thus] Rather than foster 'material' values, then, advancing capitalism does just the opposite." [Emphasis mine.]

Little Platoons and Permanent Things

I believe Russell Kirk said that if one were to summarize traditional conservatism in one word it would be community. The question, then, is of asking how community can be revived.

A central point of this entry is that wealth creation can enhance conservatism. After all, how can the prospect of a "crunchy con" organic ideal of food develop in the modern world of billions of people without the existence of a market place? Or, how can mothers be "stay-at-home-moms" without pushing for a free market that will get rid of all of the statist restraints that have made this increasingly more difficult for the middle class? Or how can motherhood become more common without all of the various statist disincentives being destroyed once and for all?

Similarly, how can man spend more time with his family or at Church functions or at community functions without a free market that increases productivity which allows the possibility? How can local market diversity exist without the development of wealth and specialization that can make this possible? How can "the little platoons" of civil society exist without them being allowed to exist as the things that they are? That is, things that are independent and exist as non-government entities. And how can they exist without wealth being created in the free market that frees man to put more effort (time, labor, and resources) into them? How can we have community if community's functions and roles are taken over by the central government? Et cetera.

The same reasoning applies to promoting fiscal conservatism and responsibility. How can these important characteristics and work ethics be promoted when social security and the welfare state exist? What they do is attack personal responsibility and lower the value of the family (and other intermediate institutions). In a recent blog entry I quoted Mises in saying that inflation is an attack against "'old-fashioned' morality and thrift." How can we encourage those values without then fighting inflation?

Capitalism, what is more, actually opens up the "higher arts" to a larger amount of men. Hence Johann Sebastian Bach becomes not a luxury that is limited to the very wealthy. It also must be remembered that a genuine free market system will always benefit the poor and the middle class the most. This is because, among other reasons, the entrepreneur who serves the greater amount of people will become richer than the entrepreneur who does not. And, obviously, the "marginal satisfactions" that are increased with increased wealth are always more substantive for the poor than the rich.

Now all of this should show the vital importance of private property. Something Richard Weaver, who was a supporter of Austrian economics (even though he would make a distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' private property), recognized. In Ideas Have Consequences he called private property "the last metaphysical right." He said that private property for man promotes responsibility, stewardship, imagination, innovation, and a commitment to something beyond himself.  That private property develops man's character and gives him a sense of honor, and in so doing so fights against dishonor and sloth. That it gives man the ability to practice virtue.

Let me also point out that Robert Nisbet, wanting to make more vital the intermediate institutions, did not see capitalism as the enemy of traditional conservatism but statism in the Leviathan form:

Capitalism has more often than not been declared the culprit in [the] historical destruction of communities. Marx and Engels gave that supposition dogmatic status, and others, including so conservative a thinker as Schumpeter, have followed, seeing in capitalism a process of continuing destruction of its social foundations in kinship and locality. But the truth is, the political state, by its incessant centralization and bureaucratization of power, has done far more than capitalism to effect this destruction...  [From Prejudices.]

True, he called for a "new laissez-faire"----and believe it or not, I pretty much agree with him, as I understand him-----but it was a call to put the intermediate institutions into context when it comes to a market order. And, for Nisbet, to make more vital these institutions is to dismantle much of statism.

With all of this said, it thus appears to me that far from looking to the State, social and cultural conservatives should look to Civil Society and Capitalism. Yes, this means an "extreme" anti-statist outlook. But if there is anything that real conservatives should have learnt, then it is that statism is no friend to conservative values. Conversely, it is private property that provides the best defense. Moral socialism is destined to fail just as much as economic socialism. Looking at the current gang in power is not something to look to for moral virtue. To make families strong and fruitful is not going to happen if man concedes to the State control or management over them.