Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism by Thomas E Woods

Author:Thomas E Woods [Woods, Thomas E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2014-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

It's Not the Markets, It's the Morals: How Excessively Blaming Markets Undermines Civil Society

John Larrivee

The extreme ideologies of the twentieth century—Communism, fascism, and National Socialism—produced totalitarian disaster wherever they were implemented. Crucially, a main reason that so many countries experimented with those horrific systems is that they wanted to stop the evils supposedly spawned by capitalism. The fact that these experiments failed (while causing far more destruction than markets ever did) suggests that the ideologies fundamentally misunderstood the source of society's problems by placing far too much emphasis on economic factors. This overweighting of economic factors was one of the major errors of the twentieth century.

Although those totalitarian regimes are no longer with us, the overemphasis on market problems persists. In many intellectual circles there is a strong tendency to exaggerate potential problems in markets, which overemphasizes the extent to which economic factors shape individuals and society. Such a perspective subtly reinforces an ethos of materialism and economic determinism. If economic factors completely explained social outcomes, there would be little room for individual choice. But the failures of twentieth-century antimarket ideologies show that market forces are not the only significant factor in society. Those regimes failed in large part because they underestimated the extent to which other factors—family, religion, civic organizations, and the other institutions of civil society—matter. These are the institutions that shape values and the underlying vision of the human person.

Today, a danger to these institutions, and free society generally, arises from an additional, but surprising, source: well-intentioned people concerned with religion and civil society who believe they are defending them from the onslaught of markets. Alas, in their attacks on moral dimensions of capitalism, they turn for conceptual weapons to theoretical systems that have been directly hostile to faith and civil society or that now foster a materialist philosophy that corrodes the respect for religion and justifies expanding the state and displacing civil society.

They do this because we have not learned well what the failures of the economic experiments imply about their underlying theories. We've seen that Communism is inefficient, and that the excessive nationalism of fascism too easily decays into hatred of others. But there remain critical lessons to be learned about the economic theories they held in common with each other (and with much of the intellectual Left today): the destructiveness of markets and its implied weakness of civil society. As result, such theories persist, and the suspicion they foster toward civil society remains dominant.

I do not mean to suggest that markets have no bad effects. I believe markets should be criticized appropriately for bad effects, to the degree that they are in fact culpable. The problem is that disproportionate blame translates into excessive negativity toward markets.

And excessive criticism of markets does not just harm the economy. It adds to the social forces that undermine the role of values, faith, and civil society, and exaggerates the case for government involvement to solve the problems of markets, which opens the door for expansion of the state.

The

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