I appreciated these thoughts about capitalism from a lecture on economics by Michael Novak. They fit in with what I believe about man being made in the image of God and being given the task of cultivating and filling the earth.
Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is a poor form of government, except when compared to all the others. Much the same might be said of capitalism.
What is new about capitalism is that it is the first mind-centered system. It is the system constituted by social institutions that support human creativity, invention, discovery, enterprise. In this new economy, the most important form of capital is not land, as it was in feudal times (that is, most of human history); nor the cold instruments of production referred to as “capital goods”; nor even financial assets. The most important form of capital is human capital. The best resource a country has is its own people. The human person is the chief cause of the wealth of nations, deploying human skill, knowledge, know-how, inventiveness, and enterprise.
The most distinctive invention of capitalism is not the lonely individual, as is often charged, but social: the stock association, the business corporation (independent of the state, transgenerational, potentially international), the social market itself, practices of teamwork, brainstorming, and consensus building, and voluntary cooperation. The capitalist vision was the first to imagine the possibility (and moral imperative) of lifting every single person on earth out of poverty, to set the goal of universal economic development, and to bring about the embourgeoisement of the poor.
The first empirical test about the nature of capitalism you might wish to employ is to watch the poor of the world. To which systems do they migrate? Which do they line up by the millions to enter—third world, pre-capitalist economies? Socialist economies? Or the relatively few truly capitalist economies, which trust, respect, and support the capacity of human persons to be creative? The facts speak for themselves.
In the United States today, for example, 99.9 percent of us derive from families that came to the United States in utter poverty—the “wretched refuse” of the earth, as the poem on the Statue of Liberty said of our grandparents. By official statistics, thirteen percent of Americans are poor today—many of them immigrants of the last few years who will not long remain poor, and measured by a standard that counts as poor families with cash income (not income in kind, from welfare benefits, for example) up to about twenty thousand dollars for a family of four. By this standard, some eighty-seven percent of Americans who started poor have already moved out of poverty, and thirteen percent have still to do so. For the poor, capitalism has no rival in offering the opportunity to move out of poverty in a very short time. The poor show by the millions that they know this.