/ economics
Although red Toryism can provide a useful corrective to the more irrational exuberance of pro-market partisanship, alternate-tradition conservatives in America would do wrong to hope to lead a new coalition on the right broad enough to rule. This is less the result of an all-powerful market than of the all-powerful character of democracy in America – driven, as Alexis de Tocqueville brilliantly described, by a love of equality that runs deeper than America’s mere preference for liberty.
Paradoxically, conservatives of the alternate tradition long for societies that are more equal because they are more noble. Citizens in such a society view the self as both whole and dependent, connected by sacred ties of mutual obligation and affection with fellow church members, citizens and neighbours – not just self-selected friends and one’s nuclear family.
Critics since Nietzsche have long complained that the logic of the Christian faith destroys nobility (taking the love of equality even past the tolerance of traditional Christians themselves). But Tocquevillean conservatives recognise in Christianity an enduring aristocratic inheritance – one that views many of the lifestyles, values, and habits of consumption that flourish in a free market as lowering and corrosive of the dignity that befits humans living the good life.
Tocqueville also recognised, however, that the logic or psychology of equality made Americans physically and mentally restless – seeking to rise from obscurity and secure material enjoyments in a society where relationships, and fortunes, were constantly made and undone. For Tocqueville, money is the measure of all things in a democracy because the logic of equality rejects noble, hierarchical, measures of value. The challenge facing would-be red state Tories is simple: How can a movement based around ennobled community life function as anything other than a retreat from American life? And if there’s an answer, how are Americans to be, well, sold on it?
Growth and Inquietude
The basic circularity implicit in our current moment reveals a deeply troubling truth about our current economic condition: growth is fundamentally generated by deepening and extending bad behaviors (such as indebtedness), the costs of which are to be obscured by economic growth. However, because those costs keep rising - in every sense, not only monetary, but socially, environmentally, generationally - the need for higher economic and social costs to spur greater growth, and greater growth to service and obfuscate the costs, increases exponentially. In recent years the frenetic logic of this basic truth has led us to a condition like a runner on an out-of-control treadmill, running madly to get ahead, at best standing still, at worst about to be thrown off the machine.
We need to think here broadly about the necessity of growth in modern society. Growth, we are told, is the engine of prosperity: economic growth makes possible the “indolency of the body” that was the fundamental goal of modern philosophy. Yet, if prosperity and comfort is the goal, then “growth” is potentially, and often in fact, distinct from that goal: growth becomes its own object, undermining our capacity to enjoy any such “indolency” (as Weber noted long ago about the “Protestant ethic”) and feeds rather into a belief that there can never be a condition of satisfaction, but rather always the craving for more (see this video for hilarious confirmation of this basic fact). As Tocqueville came to understand, one of the central conditions of modernity was inquietude - “restlessness.”
“Growth” is not necessarily, or even likely, a source of human happiness. Why is it the overarching and one univocally agreed-upon goal of our modern politics?
Patrick Deneen on Growth in What I Saw in America
“Monopoly is the sole engine of mercantilism.”
Not an engine, or one of the engines, but the sole engine. In this way, Smith recognizes that anticompetitive markets, brought about through private practices or public rules (or some combination of both) actually lead inexorably to mercantilism. Mercantilism, industrial policy, producer welfare bias—all of these come from the zero sum side of the economic ledger. The policy consists of encouraging exports and restricting imports, and it is the kind of beggar thy neighbor policy that gave us the Great Depression and ultimately the Second World War. In a sense the entire theory of trade and competition springs from that one sentence, and the word “the”.
