Dollar Darwinism

Capitalism in the United States has been extremely successful.

Growth of the economy, of individual wealth and income flow from this success.

Entrepreneurship is key to the economic success of the larger economy.

Recognizing these observations as true leads many, especially those who have profited under capitalism, to formulate a sort of social Darwinism.

Free enterprise and unfettered competition, in this theory, result in those who are superior in skill, energy and organization succeeding where others fail.

In this view, those who fail have done so because they have not worked hard enough or smart enough. It is right and proper for them to fail. The corollary to this premise asserts that any effort on government's part to offset individual economic failures is wrong. The anecdotal arguments of those who have prospered, giving their own or other's success stories, buttress the general argument with personal fervor. The earnest advocates of natural selection in the marketplace seem personally offended that anyone could feed their children using public funds.

In his book, "The Right Stuff," journalist Tom Wolfe wrote at some length of the fighter/test pilot's attitude, the "right stuff" of which top pilots were made. In discussing any accident, any crash or failure of equipment, the pilots always maintained that something was lacking in the doomed pilot's performance. There was no circumstance which excused a crash. Not equipment failure, nor weather, nor malignancy of fate could bring down a pilot who had the "right stuff."

Wolfe maintained that this attitude was a necessity for the pilots, for any doubt that they would succeed would guarantee failure. To believe without question in the right stuff was necessary to survival.

Social Darwinism follows this pattern. To admit that someone could fail economically through no fault of their own undermines the sense of accomplishment so necessary to successful participants in the economic jungle. Success is only worthwhile if some do not have economic moxie, and fail.

How a just society can tolerate the degree of personal financial erosion exhibited over the past three decades is not a question the social Darwinists care to address. Those who have gained prefer to blame widening income gaps on the measures taken by government to alleviate those same conditions. Cut off subsidies for the poor, and they will work harder and smarter, say the successful.

I don't think the advocates of this sort of Draconian measure would like the consequences. Such a revolution in policy would accelerate our decline into a sort of banana republic, with pockets of wealth becoming surrounded by favelas of deteriorating housing and hopelessly poor families. I hope we don't have to learn the hard way that the ideas of natural selection in the marketplace are too simplistic to apply to real life.