Bring Back Capitalism
A new generation of unscrupulous political leaders and Wall Street hucksters has come up with a brilliant plan to outwit the populist revolt: pretending to be critics of capitalism
Raise your hand if you saw this headline from the New York Times last week coming:
The name of Bret Stephens may be the one most associated with “markets” in media. Even his struggle-sessionish “I was wrong about climate change” piece in 2022 came with a caveat that witnessing melting glaciers in Greenland just reinforced “my belief that markets, not government, provide the cure.” Seeing an article about capitalism failing the middle class above his byline is like reading “Grammer is Overrayted” by William Safire, or “Globalism: It Doesn’t Float My Plane” by Thomas Friedman. In the end Stephens tried to say something in defense of markets, but in a bizarre reversal from 15 years ago, such protestations now need to be couched as indictments of the profit motive, especially in papers like the Times, whose upscale readers are continuing their preposterous pose of socialist chic.
The mainstream press was once home to reflexive, often hysterical defenses of the free-market system. Op-ed pages saw even the CEOs of firms caught trading against their own clients defended as “wealth creators” who did “God’s work” for a “social purpose.” No more. Now, even the very wealthy give performative speeches about the pitfalls of capitalism, corporate-funded think-tanks routinely decry its failures, and polls on sites like Fast Company even show that 35% of “C-suite executives” react negatively to the word, “capitalism.” What gives? The only headline I recall in recent years that unironically cheered the capitalist idea was a Washington Post op-ed from last summer: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Failure Shows Capitalism is Working.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
