Who will step up for capitalism?

"I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death," political consultant Frank Luntz told a gathering of the Republican Governors Association in Florida last month. "They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism."


Luntz's suggested first rule for Republicans when defending capitalism? Don't talk about capitalism. "I'm trying to get that word removed and we're replacing it with either 'economic freedom' or 'free market.' The public still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral."


Americans think capitalism is immoral? If Luntz does have the data to back this up, and he probably does, then conservatives should be fighting to change Americans' minds, not cede the argument.


And if "capitalism" is such a terrible word for conservatives to utter, then why do liberals avoid it like the plague? Consider two recent attacks on American capitalism, neither of which ever actually used the word "capitalism." First, two weeks ago, former Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern gushed about China's "superior economic model" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The man who once bragged he spent more than $60 million putting Obama in the White House explained, "The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model -- so successful in the 20th century -- is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century."


Then last week, President Obama echoed Stern's call for an end to American capitalism in a speech delivered in Osawatomie, Kan., Obama acknowledged that while free-market principles appeal "to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government," history had allegedly shown that "it doesn't work. It has never worked."


Capitalism has never worked? Really? Obama spent much of his Osawatomie speech bemoaning the fact that a byproduct of the capitalist system is inequality. He's right. Capitalism does include inequality. But so does every other system of organizing human behaviour. Capitalism just does it in a way that also makes everyone richer.


As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said in 1979:


"The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.


"In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism ...


"The record of history is absolutely crystal clear: There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system."


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