An Impressive Case for Moral Commerce

“Lorenzo” posts a most remarkable, erudite, and trenchant case for commerce over the political, theological, and mythical driving selective conformist attempts at oppression on the Thinking Aloud Blog (HERE)

“Speech at the Launch of Richard Morgan’s book Lessons From The Global Financial Crisis"

[If you read nothing else today (or this week), follow the link and enjoy (learn from, perhaps, too). I give three snippets as tasters:]

”The moral case for free commerce”

"We are here today to launch Richard Morgan’s book, a book that applies C18th wisdom to current circumstances.

One of the great virtues of knowledge of past ideas, is that it forces present thinkers to work harder. Not always an agreeable prospect. Hence the push to define the past as a realm of Stygian moral and intellectual darkness that our present knowing moral splendour has utterly superseded. Thus is current fashionable opinion both elevated and protected.

Yet much that has been paraded in recent decades as allegedly cutting edge thought is little more than ideas from as long ago as the C5th BC re-packaged. Indeterminacy of meaning, for example—which the post-modernists make so much of—was a hot topic for Socrates and the boys. While the politics of Plato’s Republic—with its Platonic Guardians, and their necessary supporting Platonic myths—seems to get endlessly recycled. Judges and international bureaucrats—some of them scientific—are notable current offerings as Platonic Guardians: with supporting Platonic myths from which dissent is, apparently, not to be permitted in polite society.

Against this recycling of the C5th BC, it would be quite an advance if we could get rather more academics and other intellectuals to advance to the standard of some good C18th thinking.

Consider the famous passage by Voltaire in his Letters on the English , first published in 1734.

‘Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There thee Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.
Let us consider for a moment how much turgid academic ranting on the allegedly intimate connection between capitalism and bigotry is rendered otiose by this simple observation of what commerce actually means. Commerce does not care for the colour of your skin, your religion, your sex, your sexuality, your ethnicity: what it cares about is the colour of your money. And the worth of your word.

It is politics, with its conjunction of coercion and category – often coercion-by-category – that makes the colour of your skin, your religion, your sex, your sexuality, your ethnicity important, even fatally important. Commerce wants your money and so must, perforce, attend to what you want. Commerce-as-commerce is not interested in any of the vile wars waged by believers—both secular and religious—against human nature as it is in the name of human nature as it is supposed to be. Commerce just wants your money. Preferably again and again. “It is better for me if you are happy with what I do” is practical commerce.’ …

…” The marginal in society are frequently rather better treated by commerce than by politics. A Fortune 500 company is much more likely to acknowledge same-sex relationships than a US State is. The former cares about getting and keeping good staff, and reaching customers. While political and religious entrepreneurs often seek to sell effortless virtue: to sell a sense of unearned self-satisfaction from simply being different to some other group—whites feeling terribly virtuous for not being black, gentiles feeling terribly virtuous for not being Jewish, straights for not being gay, those born and raised Protestant for not being Catholic, or vice versa. And so on. …

…” Long before people talked of the “pink dollar”, there was the Jewish ducat. While women could scale the heights of commerce when they were still formally barred from even the foothills of politics. The first African-American woman to become a millionaire was not Oprah Winfrey, but Madame C. J. Walker, who became a millionaire by 1910: and if you were a millionaire in 1910, you were really a millionaire. She achieved this by selling hair-care products, employing many African-American women in the process, quite deliberately so: no doubt a grave offence against the Equal Opportunity Act—don’t tell Rob Hulls.

When one looks at the denunciations of vulgar merchants and “immoral” commerce, again and again one sees the real complaint is that they attend to what people want, not what the critic thinks people ought to want. That they attend to what people are like, not what people allegedly ought to be like.

To any supporter of a static social order, the restless energy of commerce is a threat. And what social order is more static than one that seeks equality of outcome? The societies that have most raged against commerce have also created some of the most appalling horrors in history, struggling mightily and brutally against what people want.

Indeed, if one wants to establish any bigoted social order, one of the first things one has to do is to restrain commerce. As Thomas Sowell points out, part of the impetus for the Jim Crow laws in the American South was to ensure that a white person buying a first class train ticket did not find themselves sitting next to a black person. For, left to themselves, the railroad companies only cared if you could pay.”

Comment
There's much more in similar vein too.

The book to which “Lorenzo” refers is by Richard Morgan (With a Preface from Ian M. McDonald, University of Melbourne):

“Lessons from the Global Crisis: the relevance of Adam Smith on Morality and Free Markets”.

Order it from Amazon or direct to Connor Court Publishing (ISBN: 9781921421273): sales@connorcourt.com. Price: $19.95 (Australian)

Richard Morgan, with whom I have corresponded and who kindly sent me early drafts of his arguments based on Adam Smith for his book, is an experienced business man and is also engaged in public affairs. He practices what he believes in.

I commend his book to readers.

Was 'Capitalism' Designed by Adam Smith?

In a debate, so far conducted as an exchange of comments, I have made a longer comment than the system allows, so I have brought it a a post below:

I refer to my post and subsequent comments 'Beyond the Facts' with Antony North, below'

'This was not how capitalism was meant to be, originally devised by Adam Smith as a philosophy to go alongside thrift.'

My problem with this sentence is the part: “how capitalism was meant to be”.

Societies are not ‘meant to be’ (if so, who by? How does the ‘meant to be’ work?, etc.).

Societies are not ‘designed’ by any one person. All attempts at utopias fail; good intentions account for nothing; nobody
‘designed’ any previous society.

Gatherers engaged in certain behaviours which they inherited from their primate ancestors (the common ancestor of both hominines (hominids) and chimpanzees). They developed regional behavioural differences. The pre-history of primates and hominines show variations (east and west African chimpanzees, bonobo’s, and the lineage of hominines went through at least 18 different species before the human species emerged, 400,000 years ago). Homo sapiens also varied in their adaptabilities to local conditions.

Gatherers, opportunistically, also hunted small-sized animals (as do chimpanzees), later going after scavenged carcasses and, eventually hunted bigger game, assisted by primitive technologies – worked stones and wooden shaped weapons.

No individual designed these changes – those that worked assisted survival; those never tried left those who never tried at the inherited level of subsistence (for most hominid species, they had long histories, counted in hundreds of thousands of years before their extinctions).

Shepherding was picked up by minorities of local tribes, as was farming. The majority of gatherer-hunters/scavengers remained as they were as humans for most of the 400,000 year span lived by humans so far. As John Locke put it: 'in the beginning al the world was America’ (in reaction to the discovery by higher technology tribes of lower technology tribes still living as did our forebears in the forest). Even today, there are some isolated tribes still living off their surroundings as the whole world once lived.

The division of labour was not designed by anybody; it happened as individuals found it worked for them. Professor Frances Hutchison opined in his posthumous work, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), that the leader divided up the tribe into separate jobs, which was solely from his imagination. Where did the leader get the idea from? Or was it discovered independently scores of thousands of times over and again across human societies?

Hence, I come back to the question of who invented capitalism, a question that must also explain how and why it took different forms across the globe among those human societies that had moved from pastoral subsistence to ‘towns and countryside’ and had survived and functioned in many different forms across Europe and Asia, from the Atlantic to China, with many examples of some societies collapsing (Mediterranean) or stagnating (India and China) and not sustaining (or reviving) into commercial societies, as happened in late-Medieval western Europe from the 15th century.

The rise of commercial civil societies in the 18th century is explained historically and how and why they went on into distinctive forms of capitalism from mid-19th century onwards.

Crediting an individual when there were many individuals thinking and contributing their ideas, is the folly of such assertions. Just because some key thinkers (Pufendorf, Chydenius, Quesnay, Cantillon, Turgot, List, Hamilton are less well known today is not a good reason to hand such a role to Adam Smith, who did not live long enough to codify how British capitalism (which evolved differently from Scandinavian, French, German, and US capitalism) evolved. Moreover, as much of his legacy had been heavily distorted, and confused with others (Mandeville, the Physiocrats, Ferdinand Lasalle, Marx, etc., - see my Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, 2005: Palgrave-Macmillan) it is not difficult to rebut the idea that he ‘designed’ capitalism.

You ask: ‘Is it correct to say Smith devised his concepts within an ethic of thrift? I think so’.

I answer that it is a extreme generalization. ‘Thrift’ as you postulate is in Smith’s philosophy expressed as ‘frugality’, as opposed to ‘prodigality’.

Thackeray and others, (say, Trollope) noted the extravagant living of the upper-orders and saw the corruptions of the finance capital, which was the essence of late-19th century ‘capitalism’. Corruption was already evident in the South Sea Bubble, the East India Company, etc., in Smith’s time, in a relatively smaller–scale commercial society, and was more than evident in the decline of Rome. Adam Smith observed; he did not predict nor proscribe.

Capitalism evolved whatever Adam Smith or anybody else thought about the society they lived in. It has ever been thus; human nature is unchanging.