Rabbert Asks the Musical Question

“What if business’ first priority was to provide goods and services to society, to promote the common good, to make society a better place.”

As near as I can tell, much of the mistake of capitalist apologetics turns on something similar to the mistake made in Protestant polemics against the Immaculate Conception.

I trust I make myself obscure?

What I mean is this: Protestant polemics against the Immaculate Conception tend to go wrong because they identify what is normal with what is natural. “Mary *has* to be sinner *because* she’s human!” goes the argument. The moment you do that, you stop saying that Sin is normal and start saying that sin is natural: sin is what *constitutes* our humanity. The problem is: that’s false. Sin, while normal, is *never* natural because sin is what, in fact, destroys our humanity. So it’s wise to face the fact of original sin, but profoundly unwise to say that original sin is the first (or last) word about us. God’s grace is always bigger: a fact incarnated for us in the singular gift he gave to Mary of freedom from sin by the grace of Christ.

Now, it seems to me that many of the arguments made for capitalism veer into much the same sort of territory as arguments against the Immaculate Conception. They consist of variations of Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good!” proclamation. The paeans to the goodness, in itself, of “competition” and the war of all against all in grabbing at bigger pieces of the market and in making priority No. 1 the profits of the shareholders seem to me to be making arguments very similar to the notion that selfishness is not merely normal, but natural (i.e. “the way it’s supposed to be”). Capitalism is a good system for keeping vice (specifically, the vices of avarice and greed) in check (sort of) so that competing sinners cannot make life hell for the consumer by acquiring a monopoly. But the vices that ocassion the necessity of capitalism are not “natural”. They are vices and sinful and they are fundamentally ordered toward the destruction of our humanity. It is clever of the human race to have come up with a system that keeps those vices in check. But vices they remain.

Similarly, our system of checks and balances in government is a serviceable jury rig for keeping the fallen lust for power from devolving into tyranny. But that doesn’t mean the swollen egos of our ruling classes are a good thing since they drive the engine of government. It just means that sin is normal, but not natural. To paraphrase James Madison: “If men were virtuous, there would be no need of government (or capitalism, nor indeed of economics) at all.”