MarkFord
A New Rule for Discussing Economics
I don’t think much of Critical Race Theory. But there is one thing derived from it that I sometimes want to emulate. I’m talking about the idea of White Privilege – i.e., that if you are White, you should shut up about racial issues because, being White, you cannot know how debilitating it is to be the great, great, great grandchild of a slave.
I’d like to impose that concept on people that want to talk about business, economics, finance, and anything related to wealth and poverty.
Recently, I spent on hour sitting next to three acquaintances that were talking about how “exploitative” capitalism is. One of them is a college professor. Another is essentially a trust fund child. And the third has spent his/her adult life being supported by his/her spouse. None of them has ever managed a real business, let alone owned one.
This lack of real-world economic understanding did not restrain them from speaking with authority about how business owners should allocate their profits, how much the government should tax those profits, how much they should pay their employees, etc. They all seemed to believe that labor is the most valuable part of any manufactured good. And that labor should be rewarded with the lion’s share of the profits.
They shared a negative view of capitalism, although it was clear from their conversation that they didn’t have any idea of what capitalism is or how it came to be or how it transformed the world from a state where 80+% of the world population lived in medieval poverty to a global economy where less than 20% of the population is that poor.
I wanted to say that capitalism isn’t something that was invented by a cartel of rich White guys, as they seemed to believe. In fact, it wasn’t invented at all. Capitalism is simply a description of an economic system that evolved over hundreds of years everywhere in the world where people were free to buy and sell and trade their goods and their labor without the force of violence.
But socialism/communism was an invention. It was invented in the 19th century by Marx and Engels. And, as a theory, it became an immediate success. Despite causing the deaths of millions and ruining the economies of dozens of countries, it is still wildly popular in academia, politics, and Hollywood. It has also been supported by the dozens of industries and thousands of companies that are in the business of profiting from government and academic programs that support socialist ideas.
I wanted to say that, but I didn’t. The views of my three acquaintances had been formed over decades by reading and watching the daily news through the filter of media that held to the original Marx/Engels theoretical perspective. I could think of only one thing that could possibly dislodge their convictions: starting and running a successful business for longer than it would take for their grubstake to dry up.
That would put them in the center of the real economy, where how much you pay for something, how much you charge for something, and how much you pay your employees can only be done by following the natural rules of supply and demand. Theory, no matter how much you want to believe it, will not pay the bills.
Which brings me back to adopting CRT’s privilege concept for business and economic conversations: “Unless you have run a successful business for at least five years, don’t talk. Just listen.”
Can you see it on a t-shirt?
