I’m listening and Roger Scruton’s How to Be a Conservative on my Audible. He’s brilliant, of course, that goes without saying. But once he gets to talking about the economy, his argument fails.
The way capitalism works right now, says Scruton, is that it allows some people to enrich themselves by robbing us all, our children and grandchildren of their future. This leads to an ecological catastrophe. (Shoshana Zuboff, by the way, makes a similar point about surveillance capitalism robbing us of our future by depriving us of the capacity to make decisions). This is obviously a bad thing. But what can be done?
That’s where it all goes downhill. Property owners should be responsible to those affected by the way they get and administer their property. OK, but who will enforce this responsibility? Scruton has no idea because nobody does. Small communities, traditions, and the basic goodness of the human being might help, he says. But what does that even mean? How will traditions and communities prevent Facebook from stealing our data and manipulating us like little stupid widgets? There’s no answer.
This problem exists on the other side, too. Liberalism relies on the state to do something about predatory capitalism. Globalization, though, robbed the state of that capacity. What can any state do to Google? Google, on the other hand, can do a lot to the state.
I’m not seeing anything remotely resembling an answer on either side. What can limit the reach of predatory capitalism in the age of globalization?
A completely new way of thinking is needed, one that will depart from the outdated platitudes about the hand of the market or “the wealth tax.” People talk a lot about freedom, yet liberating themselves from the terminology and the ways of thinking that haven’t made any sense in 60 years proves impossible.
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