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Capitalism(s): plural noun

Commenting on Mayor Cory Booker’s stomach ailment last week, I made the point that “‘Capitalism’  isn’t singular or monolithic; there are varieties of capitalism.” Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein does a better job dilating on this point than I could have: It turns out that capitalism, like ice cream, comes in many flavors. These […]

Commenting on Mayor Cory Booker’s stomach ailment last week, I made the point that “‘Capitalism’  isn’t singular or monolithic; there are varieties of capitalism.”

Vladimir Sazonov / Shutterstock.com

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein does a better job dilating on this point than I could have:

It turns out that capitalism, like ice cream, comes in many flavors. These different capitalisms can be combined, in the same way chocolate and coffee produce mocha. There are also all sorts of mix-ins and swirls that add to the variety. And while there is a natural instinct to arrange these different forms of capitalism along a left-right axis, that is hardly the most interesting way to think about them.

And:

Given that he made his fortune in private equity, it is not surprising that what Mitt Romney now offers the country is a mix of shareholder and financial capitalism. Romney rejects the managerial capitalism of his auto executive father, considers all forms of state capitalism to be illegitimate and dismisses worker capitalism as naïve and unsustainable. And while he is not the robber baron capitalist the Obama campaign would have you believe, neither is he the entrepreneurial capitalist he pretends to be. For Romney, it is not the desire to create great products or enduring employment that really animates the entrepreneurial spirit, but the prospect of making a big score by going public or selling out to Bain Capital. In Romney capitalism, it is the financier who ultimately makes the successful entrepreneur, not the other way around.

I’m reminded of historian Edward Luttwak’s definition of “turbo capitalism” in his book of the same name:

Its advocates use no such term. They simply call it the free market, but by that bit of short-hand they mean very much more than the freedom to buy and sell. What they celebrate, preach and demand is private enterprise liberated from government regulation, unchecked by effective trade unions, unfettered by sentimental concerns over the fate of employees or communities, unrestrained by customs barriers or investment restrictions, and molested as little as possible by taxation.

The scope of Pearlstein’s column is confined to recent history, but he could have noted that Americans faced a choice of which kind of capitalism they preferred from the very beginning: that is, the choice between Jeffersonian agrarianism and Hamiltonian economic nationalism.

The particulars of the choice are different today, but the nature of the choice remains the same.

Just because the likes of Mitt Romney (who, let’s remember, used to sing a markedly different tune himself) insist that a critique of Bain Capital is an assault on the free market, conservatives should feel no obligation to do likewise.

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