It\u2019s been pretty fun to watch the GOP presidential race and all of the non-Mitt-on-Mitt violence going on, as you may imagine. However, never did I expect to hear people like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry attack Mitt Romney using language that sounds like it would be more at home coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protesters: \u201cvulture capitalist\u201d, \u201ccrony capitalism\u201d, and everything else. It\u2019s evident that those barbs are creating some sting, since Romney is firing back that anybody who attacks him for Bain Capital is attacking capitalism itself. I find that particularly odd, especially from a party that essentially takes the opposite approach when liberals attack, for example, guns. Here\u2019s a hint to Romney: you\u2019re not doing it right.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Capitalism, like a gun or a hammer or a nail, is a tool. It\u2019s a system. It has zero inherent morality. Morality only comes into play when humans decide to use those tools. A hammer that is used to build a house through Habitat for Humanity would be a moral use of that hammer, most people would say. A hammer used to break your neighbor\u2019s window is immoral, unless you are breaking the window to get him out of a burning house, in which case it is moral again. A gun used to commit a crime is used immorally, a gun used to protect yourself from an attacker is seem by most people as a moral use of a weapon. In all of these examples, the objects are just tools, free from goodness or badness until they are used in some manner by people capable of being good and bad.<\/p>\n
The free market is the same way. It\u2019s a tool. When it is used by businesses to make both the business and the customer better off, most people would agree that it is a moral transaction. When a private equity firm swoops in, liquidates a business, lays off all the employees, and enriches nobody but the initial investors, people may debate the morality of such a thing. It\u2019s not an attack against the amoral system, it\u2019s an attack against how the system is being used. Saying critics are \u201cattacking capitalism\u201d in this case is as absurd as saying people are \u201cattacking cars\u201d when they fault criminals for drunk driving.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019ve said many times before, I happen to think that the free market is a mighty useful system for a lot of things. I won\u2019t, however, ascribe morality to it a priori<\/em>. It\u2019s not inherently moral; it\u2019s not inherently immoral. What matters is what people do within and throughout the system. We can all agree to use a system while still debating the morality of using that system in certain ways. It\u2019s perfectly acceptable to try to ban things largely considered \u201cwrong\u201d even if they are allowed within the rules of the free market. Defining \u201cright\u201d and \u201cwrong\u201d and getting that balance right is difficult, of course, but it\u2019s a good and healthy debate. I welcome an honest debate about the merits of private equity firms, of CDOs, and of payday lenders, to name a few (and there are good arguments on both sides of the debate for those three examples). I shun, though, any attempt by people to close off the debate by claiming it\u2019s an attack against the free market. And that is exactly what Romney is doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been pretty fun to watch the GOP presidential race and all of the non-Mitt-on-Mitt violence going on, as you may imagine. However, never did I expect to hear people like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry attack Mitt Romney using language that sounds like it would be more at home coming out of the Occupy… Continue reading The misappropriation of morality<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[87,276,196,189,182,197],"class_list":["post-624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-capitalism","tag-economics","tag-mitt-romney","tag-morality","tag-newt-gingrich","tag-rick-perry","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":627,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions\/627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}