The egregious Charles Murray, he of Bell Curve notoriety, has a new column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he explains that the country's current malaise is due to the poor image of Capitalism. In Murray's rose-tinted view, capitalism is the putative path to fulfillment in modern society.
The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.
Murray argues that Capitalism has been unfairly maligned as a result of collusion fostered by government and a failure of the masses to comprehend the beneficial effects of the financial markets.
Murray, however, does not address the disproportionate rewards Capitalism confers on its elite beneficiaries or the brutal struggle it imposes on workers at the bottom. In Murray's happy vision, there are no "breaker boys" - the eight-year-old boys who sat over the coal chutes in the mines, picking out shale until they lost an finger, an arm, or a life.
Karl Marx was not wrong because he misdiagnosed the horrors of Capitalism. He was wrong because his prescription was violent revolution. The horrors of twentieth century Communism were indeed horrors, but they were an unsurprising reaction to the brutality of nineteenth century capitalism (and Russian feudalism).
Charles Murray's anodyne view of the universal opportunity system mocks the generations of people who have struggled through grinding low end jobs from the first day of their working life to the last, not to mention all of those maimed, poisoned or killed in the process so that the middle class will have detergent and rich men can dine on caviar.