Interesting article by Ben Stein. After singing the praises of capitalism and all it’s done for him and his family, he says:

It’s built on man’s notion that he can trust his neighbor with his money, and that if the neighbor misbehaves, the law will chase him and catch him, and that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom, that even the nobles get properly handled (Bob Dylan again) once they have been caught.

Everybody’s Business: The Hard Rain That’s Falling on Capitalism, By BEN STEIN, New York Times, January 28, 2007

Or, in other words, you can say laissez faire as much as you like, but if you don’t also have contracts, judges to enforce them, and a culture of respecting them, you don’t have capitalism.

Maybe you can have mercantilism instead; I don’t know. Ben Stein continues:

If that trust disappears — if the system is no longer a system for the ordinary citizen but only for the tough guys — how much longer can the miracle last?

EACH day’s newspaper, it seems, brings more tidings of unrestrained selfishness and self-dealing and rafts of powerful people saying it’s good for us to be robbed if only we truly understood the system.

The problem is, we’re getting to understand it all too well.

Since I’m an optimist (well, sometimes), I’ll point out that if enough people understand and decide to do something about it, there’s still time to stop the rot. This is where the Internet comes in: the more people know about a problem, the more some fraction of them might do something about it. I found this particular article through reddit, which has thus multiplied the distribution it had through the newspaper. And another advantage of such aggregators is that reddit lists articles high because many of its users like an article and rate it high. In other words, it’s not just wide dissemination, it’s interest by a group of people. Perhaps wide dissemination of information among interested groups can help reduce risks, even to capitalism.

-jsq