Defending the Free Market

The Moral Case for a Free Economy

Robert Sirico

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781596988118
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Volkswirtschaft

Thirty years ago, the economic system of the Soviet empire—socialism—seemed definitively discredited. Today, the most popular figures in the Democratic Party embrace it, while the shapers of public opinion treat capitalism as morally indefensible. Is there a moral case for capitalism? Consumerism is an appalling spectacle. Free markets may be efficient, but are they fair? Aren't there some things that we can't afford to leave to the vicissitudes of the market? Robert Sirico, a onetime leftist, shows how a free economy—including private property, legally enforceable contracts, and prices and interest rates freely agreed to by the parties to a transaction—is the best way to meet society's material needs. In fact, the free market has lifted millions out of dire poverty—far more people than state welfare or private charity has ever rescued from want. But efficiency isn't its only virtue. Economic freedom is indispensable for the other freedoms we prize. And it's not true that it makes things more important than people—just the reverse. Only if we have economic rights can we protect ourselves from government encroachment into the most private areas of our lives—including our consciences. Defending the Free Market is a powerful vindication of capitalism and a timely warning for a generation flirting with disaster.

CHAPTER 1

A Leftist Undone

I suppose the fact that I spent time on the left of the political spectrum isn’t the surprising thing. I mean, I’m a New Yorker; I’m a child of the’60s; I went to seminary in the early 1980s, when a baptized form of Marxism was next to godliness. When you take all of that into account, my sojourn on the left has about it almost the inevitability of Marxist dialectic. What most people find surprising isn’t that I was once a card-carrying lefty but that, despite my background, I somehow ended up as a passionate defender of the free economy, of liberty and limited government, of a traditional understanding of culture and morality, of all of those things that America’s Founders held dear and that our country is now in danger of losing.

If I had to pick one memory from my childhood that might explain my passion for human freedom—both as a young man who believed that freedom was to be found in socialism, and later as a defender of limited government—it would be an experience from when I was a kid, one that remains imprinted indelibly on my memory more than half a century later.

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She was a German immigrant. I was the grandson of Italian immigrants. I was about five. She was probably seventy-five. The setting of our little drama was a pair of facing apartments above the Lionel train store on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue—a neighborhood, I should add, miles from the Coney Island, the famed amusement park and beach that boasted then and still today the legendary wooden roller coaster, The Cyclone.

I say it wasn’t the Coney Island, but all the same, what a place to grow up! All I had to do was walk out my front door and I was in the middle of a vibrant multi-ethnic experiment. Across the street was my Chinese friend, whose family, stereotypically enough, ran the neighborhood laundry. The luscious scent of starch mixed with steam greeted me when I would pop in to see if he could come out to play—his mother and grandmother ironing shirts to utter crispness as I waited for him.

If you turned left from our front door, you passed a hardware shop run by a thick-accented, tall, lanky Polish plumber and his family, who kept the pipes in that neighborhood flowing freely. If you turned right and walked to the corner of Coney Island and Avenue K, you came to a kosher pizza parlor. Where else besides Brooklyn or Tel Aviv would you find a kosher pizza parlor? It was all very exhilarating, and a little disorienting. For the longest time I didn’t know the difference between Italians and Jews, other than that our kitchens smelled different.

Our closest neighbors were refugees, and when I say close, I mean very close.

Our apartment was one flight up from the street and it was a tiny one. The two front bedrooms overlooked the street with all its noise, bustle, and racket. One bedroom, where my two older brothers slept, was the size of a broom closet. My parents’ bedroom had no door—the concept of privacy being, I have come to believe, a relatively recent invention, or at least one more thing that begins as a luxury but eventually graduates to become a “necessity of life” and thus a right. Instead of a door there was just an arch to separate the bedroom from the small living room decorated with floral-patterned wallpaper. Their bed was close to my crib—later a cot—which needed to be moved any time somebody wanted to get in the closet (one of two in the whole apartment). My sister, the eldest of the four children, slept on the couch in the living room.

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This little apartment was mirrored by an identical apartment across an air shaft that also served as a roof access. One entered the apartment directly into the living room. A pivot to the left and there was the kitchen; a pivot to the right, and there was my parents’ bedroom. Looking straight ahead, the window opened onto the air shaft and a roof level with our floor. There was, of course, no pastoral scene to be enjoyed, just the apartment across the way. If we wanted to borrow something from the neighbors, there was no picket fence to lean over—just slip out of our window and two steps would have you in front of theirs. And in that apartment, from which my mother would borrow milk or sugar from time to time, lived Mr. and Mrs. Schneider (I have altered some of the names in the biographical portions of this book for the privacy of those concerned).

I spoke to Mrs. Schneider on occasion, but I remember one particular day as if it were yesterday—I think because on that day one of those critical seeds was embedded deep into me. Much of what animates me now goes back to the encounter that bright spring day. I was at our kitchen window, peering into the Schneiders’ kitchen window. Mrs. Schneider was standing there, wearing an apron. She was baking cookies—a particular and most delicious kind of Eastern European pastry known as rugelach. Today, you can buy a one-pound tin of rugelach online for $20 plus shipping, but back then there was just Mrs. Schneider, illuminated by the spring sun in a flowered dress and short sleeves rolling out the dough, putting in the walnuts doused in cinnamon and sugar, mixing all these together, rolling them up into tight crescents, placing them on a cookie sheet, and sliding them into her pale green Wedgewood oven. The process was rhythmic, almost hypnotic.

I was mesmerized by the sight, and soon enough a rich, intoxicating smell came wafting across to our kitchen. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old because my entire perspective of this memory was of leaning over a window sill that was relatively low to the ground. Mrs. Schneider had not once looked in my direction. She just kept putting one tray into the hot oven and pulling another tray out, in and out, rolling the dough in a rocking motion, until the moment the last tray was pulled. It was at that moment that Mrs. Schneider looked up, directly into my eyes, and with a slight smile said, “You’ll come, I’ll give you to eat,” beckoning with her hand waving downward.

I scampered over the window sill and went over to her, holding up my greedy little hands, over which she placed a napkin and filled it with the rugelach—warm, flavorful, aromatic.

As she did so, I noticed that running up and down her forearm was a series of blue-tattooed numbers. I hadn’t a clue what in the world that meant, but to be quite honest, I was more preoccupied with the goodies. And so I took my treasures and I went back into my kitchen. My mother came in and I told her that Mrs. Schneider had given me some treats. She seemed tired (and had a right to be: two jobs and no washing machine—which meant having to scrub the clothes on a wood and aluminum washboard in the bathtub). “That’s great,” she said. And I asked, “Mom . . . why, why does she have blue numbers on her arm?”

That was the day that I had my first lesson in moral philosophy.

We sat at the kitchen table, a white enameled piece with a red border chipped in places. Her weariness faded as she asked, “You know when you watch the cowboy shows, the Westerns?” “Yes,” I replied. She said, “You know how the cowboys will lasso a calf and turn it upside down?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “What do they do then?” I said, “They put a brand on the back of the calf.” She said, “Why do they do that?” And I said, “Because then everybody knows that that cow is owned by that cowboy.”

She said, “That’s right. Mr. and Mrs. Schneider came from a place where people treated them like animals. They thought they owned them. And what you saw on her arm was like a brand, and that’s why you always have to be nice to Mr. and Mrs. Schneider because they saw their whole family killed. And they came here to our country for refuge. They’re refugees and they came here to be safe.”

That’s when I first learned what the word “refugee” meant. I’d always thought the word just referred to another nationality. I would hear (and not always in politically correct language) that some Poles moved into the neighborhood, or that some Germans moved into the neighborhood, or that some French people moved into the neighborhood, or some refugees moved into the neighborhood. It was only now, sitting across the table from my mother, that I understood—refuge meant a place you come for safety.

My mother knew no formal philosophy, she never even graduated from high school; but there were some foundational truths she knew about anthropology and the intrinsic nature of human dignity, and she communicated to her five-year-old something perennially true: human beings must not be treated like animals. The worldview my mother was communicating to me was not about something people did (though there are plenty of things to be done) but about who people are, about something we possess in our very nature, by virtue of our mere existence, that says we cannot be treated as less than human. There is something unique, unrepeatable, and transcendent about human beings, and that something demands that their right to liberty be respected.

Left Turn

What I grasped less clearly, if at all, at the time was that this idea—this assumption so ingrained in the cultures and imagination of the West—was slipping out of our grasp, as the experience of Mrs. Schneider and her family showed. The slippage doesn’t always begin with a group of opinion leaders sitting down to vote on a new anthropology—a novel understanding of man. And a new and debased anthropology doesn’t always flare up into a world war or a holocaust. In the Germany of the ’30s and ’40s, the slippage in people’s understanding of the dignity of man was seismic and cataclysmic. In the United States of recent years, it has been more subtle and gradual, a slow erosion of the foundation of our understanding of the human person.

An experience I had with a local parish priest when I was about ten or eleven years old comes to mind. I went to see him to ask some basic questions about our religion, questions that came to my mind as the result of a conversation I’d had with a non-Catholic classmate.

I can see now that the priest was about as disoriented as I was. This was in the midst of the Second Vatican Council; everything seemed up for grabs. The idea that religion should be, well, less religious (thanks in large part to Harvard theologian Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City), had already made the rounds in the parish rectory, so when that inquisitive pre-teen asked his priest how the Church could justify its position on—I don’t even remember the question, but I do remember the answer—the priest just said, “Look, you don’t want to be a religious fanatic. Instead of worrying about dogma, why don’t you just read Huckleberry Finn?” That reply struck me—then, as it still does now—as shocking evidence of disregard for my search for spiritual meaning.

The young priest had directed me to Mark Twain. I went instead to the Brooklyn Yellow Pages and began calling and writing every Bible Chapel, spiritualist center, Kingdom Hall, and Christian Science Reading Room I could locate, asking for literature on their beliefs. Eventually I met some charismatics intent on witnessing their faith on the streets. They invited me to join a group of young people who walked the neighborhoods of New York vibrantly singing gospel songs. I experienced a sense of belonging with these folks, whose joy was palpable.

Had I stuck with them I might have made a career in gospel music because they would eventually become internationally known as the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. But I took another path. I left the Brooklyn of my childhood and moved to the West Coast where I continued my spiritual journey among what one might call experimental evangelicals—first in Seattle among the Jesus People.

But it wasn’t long before I was less a wandering truth seeker than a prodigal son, a lost boy violating one taboo after another. The first—I stopped attending Mass. Within the next few years I would break many more. What I most needed, what would have most calmed the turbulence in the soul of that newly minted teenager, was not rebellion but reconciliation. But I didn’t realize that at the time. Like so many people around me, I thought that breaking taboos was an emancipating experience, a necessary step on the path to self-discovery. I experienced liberty as license, thinking that the landscape could somehow be improved without a frame around it.

Unanchored from the traditions and friendships that had given my life some modicum of meaning and purpose, I found myself among new associates—comrades with whom I could speak freely about matters that until then I would have mentioned only in hushed tones in a dark confessional. These were the years of Woodstock and Stonewall, of the Beatles and Janis Joplin, a period that saw revolutions to overturn every standard in religion, the arts, fashion, architecture, literature, and sexuality. Sometimes it seemed like there was a new revolution every week. Everywhere I looked, some tradition was being bashed and the “new” and “relevant” uncritically embraced.

It was during this tumultuous period in my life, with the world so radically changing around me, that I turned to politics in an attempt to make sense of myself and my purpose on planet earth.

In those days, if there was a sit-in, I was sitting in it. If there was a demonstration, I was carrying a sign. I read Marx and found him boring. I listened to chic leftist intellectual Herbert Marcuse give a lecture and found it clear as linoleum. But the sense of change—that young people could do something that would count for the coming generations, that people could live free of the dominance of others—these were invigorating ideas.

I came to know Jane Fonda and her then husband Tom Hayden as I campaigned for Hayden in the 1976 California Democratic primary against incumbent U.S. Senator John Tunney. One particularly memorable interaction I had with Jane was at KPFK Radio in Los Angeles (the flagship station of the California left, the same place where the Symbionese Liberation Army had deposited its Patty Hearst tape) right around the time that Saigon tragically fell to the forces of North Vietnamese Communism. In the Hayden campaign I organized fundraisers and actively registered voters, and on one particular evening, I was standing with Jane in the rear parking lot of the Gay Community Services Center on Highland Boulevard after we had had a voters’ registration drive there. As we were parting, I slipped a joint of marijuana into her hand. She was grateful.

“Thanks, Bob,” (I was a Bob in those days) “Tom doesn’t let me keep it in the house during the campaign.”

“A fine feminist you are,” I replied, as we hugged and parted.

After that our paths continued to cross from time to time as I became active in a panoply of radical causes that Fonda and Hayden also supported: I campaigned for women’s rights, for gay rights, for the farm workers’ boycott of Gallo wine—I could go on and on.

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It’s not an exaggeration to say that I had the feeling I was deep inside a revolution. When my old comrades from those days hear about me now, the eyebrows go up. When I tell them that not only did I find my way out of the “New Left” of ’70s L.A., but that in learning to love liberty and limited government I also found my way back to my Christian faith—well, for my old friends on the left, it’s just too much. When they discover that this post-Vatican II Catholic priest is the president of an international think tank dedicated to promoting a society rooted in unchanging moral truths about good and evil, to championing the free economy, private property, and the rule of law as the great safeguards of the poor—well, if they’re still like my old activist friends from my days in L.A., they shake their heads in bewilderment.

What was the moment that I began my journey away from the left?

One hot summer afternoon a little band of my friends and I spent a good part of the day in several different protest demonstrations before we ended up back at my Hollywood apartment. Sitting around the living room, we recounted the events of the day and—idealistic as we were—expressed our dreams about what the world would look like “when the revolution comes.” Everyone would be equal. There would be no more classism, homophobia, and sexism. And it was in that relaxed and trusting atmosphere that I said something to the effect that “Yes, and when the revolution comes we’ll all be able to shop at Gucci.”

There was silence. The smoke stood still in the air. (I prefer not to say what kind of smoke it was.)

My good friend Ann (I used to call her my Lesbyterian Trotskyite) was sitting on the floor next to me. She leaned over and put her head on my shoulder.

“Gucci?”

“Yes,” I replied. “It’s a metaphor for the kind of society we are seeking to build, where everyone will have access to quality goods and services.”

“Gucci?” she asked again, looking around the room at the other comrades. “I don’t think you’re really a socialist.”

She seemed to know before I did.

Not long after that I made the mistake that would prove fatal to my leftist ideology. I didn’t realize it, but it began when I visited the apartment of an activist friend of mine, who introduced me to a new resident of his apartment complex. They walked me to my car, which was coincidentally parked directly behind the car of the new neighbor. I immediately noticed some bumper stickers on his car that were very politically incorrect (we used the phrase unironically in those days). An argument ensued, wherein I pontificated about the need for the redistribution of wealth, or some such thing. The fierce debate only subsided when the neighbor fixed me with a stare and observed, “You are delightfully dumb, Sirico. I am going to undertake the task of educating you.”

To engage an intelligent and informed conservative in a conversation stretching over not an elevator ride or a meal but many weeks and months was a new and eye-opening experience. My newfound friend supplied me with a little library of liberty. (Some of those titles are listed at the end of each chapter.) Gradually, over the next six months, the ideas from those texts caused something inside me to shift. They set off an intellectual avalanche. Slowly at first but then more and more rapidly, a voracious hunger to learn more—not merely about economics and politics, but about the fundamental truths of human existence—overwhelmed my shallow leftism.

I had long been interested in exploring deep questions, but I had gone a...