Capitalism Has a Brand Problem

Time for "it's toasted" for the only workable economic system

Let’s get the blood pumping today with a deep-fried, smothered-and-covered moron: Italian economist Clara Mattei.

This clip puts me in a pickle because I just used the Billy Madison “we are all dumber for having heard that” clip yesterday — I can’t use that clip every single day. Though our dialogue is pushing me in that direction.

Let me engage with Mattei’s ahistorical lunacy more than it deserves: Markets are literally as old as recorded history, the oldest examples of human writing are cuneiform tablets recording the trade of goods in Mesopotamia circa 3200, B.C. When goods are traded according to prices determined by the free market, that’s capitalism (and I don’t know why Mattei replies “yes” to a question that undermined everything she previously said). The notion that “indigenous cultures” — all of them! Everywhere in the world! — lived under some sort of hippie collectivism and did not compete for resources is a hilarious lie, and lumping every “indigenous culture” together is also extremely racist. It’s interesting that Mattei sees all liberal democracy as a capitalist plot, because that means that she must view liberal democracy’s big achievements — such as the Bill of Rights and universal suffrage — as 1) Capitalist, and 2) Therefore bad. I also wonder how Mattei explains the vast expansion of the welfare state that happened under this alleged plot. And, fundamentally, it is not true that capitalism has “destroyed” many people around us — the time period Mattei is talking about actually coincided with dramatic improvements in life expectancy, wealth, and many other measures of human well-being.

Capitalism is the economic system used by every wealthy nation. It is about as controversial among economists as the existence of Australia is among cartographers; by interviewing Mattei, Ways to Change the World (which is a BBC 4 show) is basically interviewing the one cartographer who thinks “Australia” is a false flag cooked up by the Freemasons. Economists have huge debates about how and how much a government should tax and spend, but there’s only one operating system that most take seriously. Even so, public opinion of capitalism is flagging, and you almost never hear anyone left-of-center argue that capitalism is good. Why is that?