Dear Friends,
It seems to me that the integration of African Americans into White society was as much a factor of capitalism as it was political.
Take the example of Jacky Robinson into the major leagues. What today seems obvious is not so obvious before it has been done successfully. We look back and think that it is absurd to exclude people from an activity due to the color of their skin. But, in the day, people were afraid of public opinion. They didn’t have a good read on whether or not it would be tolerated.
That is the role of the entrepreneur… to see an opportunity and seize on it. If you reduce baseball to it’s capitalist roots you see that each firm vies to have the “winning team.” the more winning your team the more profit there is in owning it. With this as the incentive it is in the best interests of the owners to put the very best players on their teams… that are available.
The entrepreneur notices that the available players are not necessarily the best players alive. So in his evil way the entrepreneur changes the parameters of what attributes are allowable. In this case erasing skin color as a disqualifying attribute. The entrepreneur who makes the leap first… successfully makes monopoly profits until the rest catch up. But in the interim the entrepreneur has bought up the best players at the beast prices. Monopolizing them to his evil ends.
Take the example of the wicked factory owner. He wants access to the cheapest labor he can get. Cheap in the smart capitalist terms… Lower labor cost per unit produced. Cheap cost is not necessarily cheap labor. Labor that is very inefficient is not cheap at any price… He sees that there is a segment that is excluded from his factory. If the exclusion were removed the available pool of labor would go up and his labor cost would at least stabilize if not go down. So the self interested entrepreneurial factory owner will seek to open up the formerly excluded people to his labor pool. It is in his self interest.
This is a fundamental attribute of capitalism and the market system. The very thing that make capitalism so hated by the romantic anti capitalists. Like Moser and Freyer worrying about the market system’s effect on community and the loss of ethnicity. To Marx and (in his own way) Schumpeter, on the imminent demise of capitalism… In the case of Schumpeter his book might have saved us all decades of stagnation at the hands of the progressives… One uniting attribute of all the anti capitalists is that they have a fixation on groups.
They love to group people and think about them in groups and as members of groups. Like meteorologists use blocks of data to represent large volumes of air in their computer simulations. It makes the computing task much easier. But introduces a huge amount of discrepancy. That discrepancy is why the weather man claims it will rain and it actually is clear and sunny. People are people. We react as individuals. Our actions then aggregate into societal action. But to try to represent human beings as groups looses a huge amount of data. This is a case of arguing from the specific to the general.
Because capitalism has introduced the ability of the individual to follow a path according to his or her desires and propensities. Allowing people access to the means of human improvement. The very thing that the original conservatives like Burke wanted to protect. That genie or djinn is loosed from the bottle. It will wrought what it wrought. But it is loosed. The internet only exacerbates the situation for the anti capitalist.
As more and more people follow their own paths and free themselves from group attachment we will see an improvement in the reactions of people to those that are different. As we have said before the sofa salesman cares nothing for the color of the customer’s skin he only frets over the color of his money…
But this vanilla-ing of society infuriates the romantic anti capitalist. They look at people doing their own thing and never fail to find fault. The planet cannot sustain it! Is a modern cry. But it has echoes from the past as well. During the 1930’s the Elite were claiming the Depression was caused by the diminishing of the Earth’s natural resources. As we have seen, empirically, that was not the case then, nor is it the case now.
It is romantic, to be anti capitalist, but romance is blind, and it is often foolish.
