Creative Destruction
[Bruce Frohnen  02/21 04:45 PM]

I'd like to emphasize Ross's point. Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the phrase "creative destruction," predicted that capitalism would naturally bring about socialism by destroying people's desire to work hard to build legacies for their families. The desire to have a safe job with plenty of leisure, he argued, naturally would lead to a kind of soft, democratic socialism of government-directed markets. Guess what? We're pretty much there already. And why do so many people mock the charge? Because most of us LIKE the kind of soft socialism we have now, in which the "safety net" and the myth of efficient markets relieve us of any pangs of conscience we might have about messing over our employees, co-workers, or the towns our cheap big-box stores destroy. We've been engaged in a decades-long flight from responsibility, and until we recognize that this is a life intrinsically less worthy than the pursuit of virtue, it doesn't matter how often we point to its costs to people trapped in lives of drug use, multi-generational illegitimacy and poverty, crime and violence. We have to believe that life is a gift of which we must strive to be worthy before we can start taking responsibility for others, rather than handing that responsibility over to the government, or the myth of the market, for that matter. Markets should be free, and we should be responsible, including for our brothers.