How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World

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How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World

by John Paul Rollert at the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/sociopathic-capitalism/506240/

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The rise of renegade capitalism—a spirit that ripened in the ‘60’s and ‘70s before flowering in the greed-is-good decade that followed—breached an uneasy truce that individuals like Adam Smith had struggled to preserve between competition and cooperation, the two forces that sustained, as a moral and practical matter, a dynamic economy. If the generation of Keynes and Young had taken the expediency of the competitive drive for granted, those who followed returned the favor by downplaying cooperation in commercial transactions as an unremarkable act without any secondary effects of moral or social significance.

Such developments have important implications for the remainder of Friedman’s trade thesis and its relationship to the Republican nominee: If the “possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation” is, as Friedman put it, “frequently denied,” that may be because, under the sentimental sway of renegade capitalism, the transactions Friedman describes too often relish of something unpleasant even when they are “voluntary and informed.” For anyone who has ever had her immediate circumstances exploited for commercial gain—whether it be a $7 Diet Coke at the airport or an outrageously high-interest payday loan—a world of ruthless competitors guided by nothing more than blind ambition for profit is hardly a pleasant place. At the same time, when Friedman’s stipulations come to be regarded as less an ideal for commercial transactions than simply a lawful limit—and how can they seem much more to someone convinced of the moral and practical warrant of self-interest?—the provisos “voluntary and informed” can easily appear mere obstacles to self-advancement that call for clever circumvention.

Donald Trump, a man who has made a career renegotiating agreed-upon terms and exploiting ambiguities in contract language (real as well as imagined), seems the embodiment of such an approach to business. Rather than regard voluntary and informed transactions as a model for commercial exchange, to him, any business deal appears like a small battle in a never-ending war for financial supremacy.

The upshot of such an approach is something dismal and squalid: Vulnerability is targeted, duress exploited, and ignorance thoroughly mined. Nothing about such conduct is especially civil. And while one might nonetheless maintain that, in a world full of such agents, both parties to business transactions still benefit from them—and so everyone else more broadly benefits from their doing business—such a conclusion will invariably smack of something sterile, scientific, and ultimately specious, for most people certainly won’t feel that way.


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1. The GOP has been undoing civilized norms of life for the last 30 years.

Long before Trump came along and pulled down all manner of democratic norms.