Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism

369 Pages·2014·1.68 MB·English

by  Peter Foster

Why We Bite the
Invisible Hand
ALSO BY PETER FOSTER
The Blue-Eyed Sheiks: The Canadian Oil
Establishment (1979)
The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: Canada’s
Superbureaucrats and the Energy Mess (1982)
Other People’s Money:
The Banks, the Government, and Dome (1983)
From Rigs to Riches:
The Story of Bow Valley Industries (1985)
The Master Builders:
How the Reichmanns Reached for an Empire (1986)
Family Spirits: The Bacardi Saga:
Rum, Riches and Revolution (1990)
Self-Serve: How Petrocan
Pumped Canadians Dry (1992)
Towers of Debt:
The Rise and Fall of the Reichmanns (1993)
Why We Bite the
Invisible Hand
The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism
Peter Foster
Pleasaunce Press
Toronto
© Peter Foster, 2014
Pleasaunce Press
[email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-0992127602
ISBN-10: 0992127602
ISBN 978-0-9921276-1-9 (kindle)
ISBN 978-0-9921276-2-6 (PDF)
For Laurel
About the Author
Peter Foster was born and educated in England. He studied economics at
Cambridge and worked for the Financial Times of London before immigrating
to Canada in 1976 to work for the Financial Post, where he became a senior
editor.
He has written eight previous books. His first, The Blue-Eyed Sheiks, was a
number one bestseller. Self-Serve won Canada’s National Business Book Award.
His magazine journalism — which has appeared in Canadian Business, Toronto
Life, the Globe and Mail Report on Business magazine, Saturday Night and the
Walrus — has won awards for subjects as diverse as Moscow McDonald’s, oil
exploration in the Beaufort Sea and the story behind Toronto’s SkyDome. He is
a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Calgary-based Petroleum
History Society.
Since 1998, he has been writing a twice-weekly editorial column for the
Financial Post section of the National Post. In 2011, he received the English-
language Economic Education Prize from the Montreal Economic Institute, and
his columns have twice been shortlisted for the international Bastiat Prize.
He lives in Toronto.
Contents
Introduction: Dirty Pictures
1 Cardboard Cut-out Capitalism
2 The Sage of Kirkcaldy
3 Fears of a Clown: The Golden Arch-Enemy
4 Dark Satanic Minds
5 The Passion of Ayn Rand
6 Tuesdays with Mandeville
7 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
8 Do-It-Yourself Economics
9 The Invisible Metaphor
10 The Rise and Fall and Rise of John Maynard Keynes
11 The Darwin Wars
12 Homer Economicus
13 The Chimpanzee in the Room: Darwinian Politics
14 Moral Climate
15 Global Salvationism
16 The Greenest Businessman in America
17 Bill Gates and the Pitfalls of Philanthrocapitalism
18 Conclusion: Still Spinning After All These Years
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Introduction
Dirty Pictures
D
ays before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, in early November, a massive
storm hit the east coast of the United States, inflicting billions of dollars of
damage on New York City and its surrounding areas. A 14-foot storm surge
swamped lower Manhattan. Millions lost power in the U.S. northeast. More than
a hundred people died.
Democratic president Barack Obama won the election, beating the
Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. The media concluded that Superstorm
Sandy had helped the president, because it enabled him to look “presidential”
when visiting devastated areas and halted any momentum that his opponent
might have built. Obama toured parts of New Jersey, accompanied by the state’s
bulky and charismatic governor, Chris Christie, who had been the keynote
speaker at the Republican convention. Christie had previously been sharply
critical of Obama, but in the wake of the disaster, he spoke of the president’s
“extraordinary leadership.”
As significant, the storm contributed to Obama’s endorsement by New
York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who controlled a digital
information empire, and in doing so focused on one of the key issues raised by
the storm: whether it supported the case for catastrophic man-made global
warming, and for draconian policies to confront it. Mayor Bloomberg wrote that
one candidate, Obama, “sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens
our planet; one does not.”
And so Bloomberg was backing the candidate who projected climate
catastrophe. Put another way, a capitalist billionaire was acknowledging that the
capitalist industrial system posed an existential threat to the world, and was
supporting extensive and intrusive government policies to counter it.
Few, if any, regarded this fact as surprising or contradictory. It was widely
felt — even by capitalists — that capitalism was an unstable and potentially
dangerous system that bred inequality and needed to be regulated and “fettered”
for the public good.
Superstorm Sandy pointed to another conundrum about people’s — and
their representatives’ — attitudes toward the system that had made their society
so rich. In the storm’s wake, both Governor Christie and the Democrat governor
of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, hastened to assure their constituents that
under no circumstances would they allow free markets to work. The most
immediate, obvious and predictable result of their interventions was four-hour