The 'Cultural' Critique of Capitalism

0:00When I was still a graduate student at Auburn University, and a Mises fellow, in January of 1996, I sauntered into Jeff Tucker's office just to see what was happening. What was happening for the cause of liberty that day, and true to form, Jeff Tucker says, Could you deliver a brown bag seminar on the arts need the government to flourish? And I said, well, sure, I could probably do that. I said, great, you're going on in 10 days. And so I had 10 days to prepare a winning seminar on the topic, and it turns out the seminar was a lot of fun, and actually set my course for my dissertation. My major professor was there at the seminar, and he, after the seminar, suggested that I pursue the topic of economics and the arts for my dissertation.

0:52and incidentally my professor likes to fashion himself as a libertarian free market type and it turns out during the discussion he kind of came out for national the National Endowment for the Arts and came out for art subsidies now it's really interesting I on the other hand chose to follow the advice given by Ludwig von Mises in his memoir notes and recollections Mises advised students quote that the refutation of current errors is excellent subject matter to be the National Bound for the Arts Culture Killers.

1:52And it is this cultural critique of capitalism that I will be discussing today. I hope to demonstrate that the real culture killer is not capitalism but the Leviathan state. The government, not the free market, is responsible for stamping out individualism and artistic creativity. The state has used its power via the public schooling and the welfare state to create a mass society and it cannot abide individuals but rather finds it easier to rule subjects who neither think much or create much. Hence, it is the government that has given us our cultural swamp and not the free market. Those that attack the free market do not acknowledge this at all. And this is a classic manifestation of the broken window fallacy. Henry Hazlitt, in his book, Economics in One Lesson, I see it's back on the table, he begins his book with the story of a hoodlum who breaks the window of a baker's shop, a rock.

2:45He just is filled with rage, I guess, you know, urban rage, and throws and breaks the the window in the shop, and pretty soon the crowd forms and begins to rejoice that the economy will soon receive a boost, is hoodlum is growing the economy, not unlike our president, and they see that there's going to be increased wealth for the window glazier because he's got extra work to do now, but what they fail to see is the loss of wealth of a nearby tailor who would have sold the baker a suit if the baker now didn't have to spend 250 bucks on the window. So they see one thing but they don't see another. Now too many people who say they care about our culture see the mess it is in, they just look around, they just surf the broadcast television, and they call for more government, not seeing or not caring that it is the government who created this mess in the first place.

3:39And so these anti-capitalists leave us with what I like to call the cultural critique of capitalism and it goes, it has different variations, but the main thing goes something like this. In free market capitalism, only what sells gets produced, good art does not sell, therefore the free market will not allow good art to be produced. That's the main theme. theme. Now, examples of this thinking abound. Last summer, I was blessed with the opportunity to appear on a talk show on Minnesota Public Radio after having an article of mine published in the Wall Street Journal attacking the NEA for a particular problem that they were creating. Several of the callers claimed that we need the NEA because we cannot rely on the market to deliver quality art. We just can't do it. One individual in particular said that the The market results in droves of teenagers going to see the latest Batman movie instead of watching great literature.

4:39Also another example of this type of thinking was two years ago at the Grammy Awards. The NEA was the pet cause and Richard Dreyfus, the actor fresh from his appearance in Mr. Holland's opus, gave a passionate plea for the continuance of the NEA to preserve our national cultural heritage. The implication was clearly that the free market cannot be trusted, and never mind that Mr. Holland's opus was hardly high art, or that there was enough wealth represented by those in the audience to privately fund the NEA several times over. No, they wanted you and me to fund the NEA. The art mentality, which economist William Graham has categorized as a subset of the anti-capitalist mentality, appears often in the print media as well.

5:26The New York Times regularly runs editorials attempting to explain why the market will not sustain a vibrant, artisan culture in the United States. And of course, when they say the United States, they really mean Manhattan. Even what's really shocking, even middle America's Omaha World Herald ran a column last fall, implying that if our culture is left to free individuals, we will deserve Shakespeare and instead, while away are ours watching the days of our lives in general hospital. Robert Bruce Steen, a playwright and artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, wrote recently in the New Republic that, quote, the federal subsidy is a form of encouragement, not for the sunny bonos of this world, but for those artists who have chosen to avoid the marketplace.

6:12Now, even our First Lady, Hillary Clinton, has taken to criticizing our consumer culture while addressing dignitaries overseas. The common thread throughout is that if left to the free market, Artistic Endeavor Will Be Squashed, We Free Marketers, Our Cultural Know-Nothings Now the most sophisticated argument in this tradition was made in 1953 by Dwight MacDonald. And MacDonald had a lot of insights, I think, on the actual problem. He had an article entitled, A Theory of Mass Culture, and I think he correctly saw our cultural problem McDonald attributed cultural decline to the formation of what he called mass society.

7:12He saw that American society has increasingly become a mash of indistinguishable units rather than a country of individuals. were no longer related to one another as individuals nor as members even of communities, but only to some abstract entity like the party or the state. Note that the media, if you watch the news media especially on TV, they refer to us less and less even as citizens, but more and more as taxpayers. They were not even individuals, just taxpayers. Mass Man is a uniform unit, undifferentiated from millions of other mass men. The implications for art Art and culture can be expected. Art is one of the highest forms of human expression. Good art is necessarily created by individual humans. Hence, it is less and less likely that good art will be created in a mass society. The entertainment that is peddled to the masses tends to be more and more kitsch and less and less art. This is because mass culture must be, by its very nature, very democratic and tends to the lowest common denominator.

8:19If we want to entertain the masses after all, then we have to bring the level of the entertainment down so that all of the parts of the mass can understand. To see how this decline has continued to the present, note that when McDonald wrote his article, which was in 1953, NBC still was broadcasting Shakespearean plays on broadcast television, and they also broadcast performances by their own symphony that they sponsored themselves, conducted by Arturo Melrose Toscanini. We've come a long way, baby. Now today's programs, from Melrose Place to Ellen to Oprah, are basically intellectual cotton candy. They're easy to digest, mostly air, and they don't have a lot of substance. What makes mass culture such an impediment for good art is that mass culture's bread and butter is the leveling of taste and the eradication of any type of cultural or even and Age Distinction.

9:17McDonald, in his article, pointed to Life Magazine as a prime example of juxtaposed on its pages, one assumes, with a straight face, the publishers put expositions of atomic theory and stories of celebrity love lives. Both are of equal importance. Both are worthy of our undivided attention. Now, about mass culture, McDonald writes, quote, It thus destroys all values, since value judgments imply discrimination. Mass culture is very, very democratic. It absolutely refuses to distinguish or discriminate against or between anything or anybody. All is grist to its mill, and all comes out finely ground indeed," end of quote.

10:04Another manifestation of mass society is this century's youth culture. Increasingly throughout this century, our youth have attended the same motion pictures, listened to the same music and watched the same television programs as their adult parents. This has happened more and more over the course of the century. The result is that age distinctions are blotted out as a result of the youth wanting to and also trying to be treated as adults more and more and more. We don't grow up too fast, and it turns out adults are increasingly never growing up. We have no sense that there should be, as the Apostle Paul instructs us concerning spiritual maturity, a putting off of childish things and maturing toward adult thought.

10:50But in our mass culture, nothing is really childish and nothing is really adult. There is simply mass entertainment. Now while McDonald was, I think, an acute observer of the effects of mass society and and rightly documents a mass society's destructive nature, he goes astray by blaming mass culture on the development of capitalism. He reasoned that mass culture is only possible when entertainment can be mass produced. Now McDonald equated mass production with capitalism and in particular free market capitalism. And he saw that the free market also broke down the old feudal arrangements and distinctions of Nobility. Hence, blaming capitalism for mass culture for him was logically followed.

11:36Now as wise as McDonald was, I think he went astray here. No one has to tell those of us in this room that the free market is the most efficient institution allowing people to get what they want. However, this does not mean that it mandates, that the free market mandates what people must demand. And no one made this point better than Ludwig von Mises himself In his book, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, he explains that, quote, nobody ever contended that unhampered capitalism, that in unhampered capitalism, those fair best who, from the point of eternal standards of value, produce those things that ought to be preferred. Millions of people like detective stories, mystery pictures, tabloid newspapers, bullfights, boxing, whiskey, cigarettes, and chewing gum.

12:25The entrepreneurs who provide in the best and cheapest way all the things required for the satisfaction of these wants succeed in getting rich, but the entrepreneurs weren't the ones that were creating the wants. Nevertheless, we cannot blame the messenger for the message. We cannot blame the market for people's tastes. Mises expanded his argument during an address at the Mont Pelerin Society when he argued that quote it is not the fault of capitalism that the masses prefer a boxing match to a performance of Sophocles' Antigone or jazz music to Beethoven symphonies or comics to poetry but it is certain and this is a key point it is certain that while pre-capitalistic conditions as they still prevail in the much greater part of the world makes these goods accessible to only a small minority of People, capitalism gives to the many a favorable chance at striving after them.

13:20So it's capitalism that expands our opportunity to contemplate and expose ourselves to great art. It was also not free market capitalism that led to the breakdown of taste distinctions. In fact, if you look to American history, most of the cultural institutions that began were created by very successful entrepreneurs that made their fortune during the most laissez-faire period of this country, of our republic. And before the address I consulted the old, not the new, the old Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians and looked at the article of the Symphony Orchestra concerts and found that the Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh symphonies, and these were the only ones that were large enough to receive attention in his article at that time, which is about 1926 when it was written, I think, all of those symphonies were all began initially and were sustained initially purely through private guarantors and subscriptions.

14:30There wasn't any government money. And in fact, the Boston Symphony was created single-handedly by Henry Lee Higginson, who pledged to put $20,000 of his own money into the venture every year, until the orchestra became self-supportive. And that was $20,000 before a century of inflation has eaten it away. The cultural critics of capitalism were at a loss to explain the existence of these types of cultural institutions. They can't do it. If the market is merely a social institution to facilitate exchange, and unhappened capitalism does not lead to a breakdown of taste, then to solve the puzzle, one must identify the real root cause of mass society. And it should surprise no one that the chief agent fostering mass culture in this century is a collectivist state.

15:19Wilhelm Röpke, the German economist in the Austrian tradition, also thought that our cultural decline was due to mass society, Mass Society, but he convincingly demonstrated that mass society is a result of government centralization of power. Concentration of power is necessary for the ruling class. It is what they live for. Röpke demonstrated how the gargantuan welfare state has turned the citizens into cogs of the mass. He also forcefully argued that only the free market will allow for individuals to maintain their integrity as human beings created in the image of God. Now why is this important for culture? It is important because taste on the part of the artist or on the part of the art lover does not spontaneously generate. Good taste must be developed. A person's taste depends on his own natural endowment and how much he's willing to put into its development.

16:10In other words, it is closely related to his time preference. When I started listening seriously to classical music in high school, I sometimes had to demonstrate what I thought was great self-control, because some of the music that I listened to wasn't as easily acceptable as the Bee Gees. It did not gratify me instantly. It did not have a beat I could dance to, assuming that you can call the jerking around the kids' do-today dancing. I had to be willing to postpone some of my initial happiness if I was going to develop The State, however, actively works against the development of taste while fashioning us into our piece of the mass. Its chief weapon of mass formation is the public school system.

16:56And this brings us back to the broken window fallacy. This is an issue that most cultural critics ignore entirely. Most people see that society prefers the Spice Girls to Beethoven. So we need government intervention, they call for. But they ignore the fact that it was the government that got us into this cultural mess and one of its chief weapons was the public school system. The agenda of the public school system has always been to stamp out individualism. Its number one goal is to teach kids how to be good citizens, i.e. how to be good servants of the state. Its goal was never to combat illiteracy. We didn't need it to combat illiteracy. For example, in Massachusetts, the literacy rate was higher before compulsory public education than it is now.

17:45The goal of the public school system is to fashion children into carbon copies of the good taxpayer. The state school culture is radically secular, amoral, and egalitarian. Students are taught that no one is better than anybody else. A Georgetown student recently sued his teacher for giving him a B. No viewpoint is treated as any better than any other. Nobody is treated as any smarter than anybody other. No piece of art is better than any other. It is this mentality that is led to the teaching children, the Macarena, in the name of musical education. That's a true story. It actually happened. This state of affairs, incidentally, was foreseen by J. Gressam Matian, the great Calvinist Theoretist, Theologian and Libertarian. He recognized that a centralized bureaucratic school system would turn out fewer and fewer students that retained their individuality.

18:35While testifying before a Senate committee against the proposed U.S. Department of Education, he explained, quote, I am perfectly ready to admit that standardization in some spheres is a good thing. It is a good thing in the making of Ford cars. But just because it is a good thing in the making of Ford cars, it is a bad thing in the making of human beings. for the reason that the Ford car is a machine and that a human is a person, but a great many educators today deny the distinction between the two, end of quote. And Mason was saying this in 1927, by the way. Now throughout this century the state is increasingly centralized schooling into the world's largest job training program. And this is another point I think nobody sees. We're talking about the supposed doing away with welfare as we know it, but the people People that don't want to do away with welfare say, well, we've got to have some place for these people to get jobs.

19:26We need a job training program. We need a government job training program. We already have one. It's called the public school system. That's the biggest job training program the government's ever funded. Now as if this was not enough to destroy the culture, the state also spent this century expanding the welfare state. We know that politicians cannot grow the economy, but they can grow the welfare state. One of the many disastrous effects of the welfare state is that it increases people's time preferences. It causes them to be less likely to want to put off gratification and to save and it increases their propensity to want to consume now. The state says you no longer have to put off immediate gratification in order to find work.

20:11You can watch soaps all day and collect a government check for your effort. If you do have work, you don't have to worry about saving for the future. If you lose your job or you get sick, don't worry, the government will take care of you. You don't even have to save up money for a down payment for a house or college education. The government will subsidize your loan. Don't worry, be happy! The welfare state is very seductive and results in a government-trained mass with MTV attention spans. Fewer and fewer individuals are willing to do what it takes to develop good taste. It is so much easier and entertaining to watch the rock video than to patiently listen to a Mozart symphony. On top of all this, the welfare takes wealth away from the productive individuals who tend to have lower time preferences and puts it into the hands of the Thai time preference people, further inflating the demand for married with children and snoop doggy dog.

21:03The National Endowment for the Arts further exacerbates the problem, and in the name of art, it works to destroy distinctions regarding tastes When people object to grants for the obscene or the just plain silly, the reply is invariably, well, who's to say what is art? The implication being that whoever it is that does decide what is art, it's certainly not the ones that are having their money stolen from them. The NEA takes your money and actively works toward egalitarianism and mediocrity. Artistic values fall prey to the temptation of government money. Increasingly, minority concert soloists are being sought for symphony orchestra concerts not because of their talent, but because it increases the chances of the symphony receiving a government grant. In 1969, George Plimpton, that year's grantee for poetry works, gave Aram Sororium $1,500 for a one-word poem, Light.

21:57And it was purposely misspelled, L-I-G-H-G-H-T. I guess it was light. $1,500, one word, that was it. Nice work if you can get it. The latest push for multiculturalism was a $60,000 grant to the California Indian Basket Weavers Association. If the NEA won't do it, who will? Now one of Ludwig von Mises' key insights is that there is no middle road between the free market and socialism. When critics of the market call for the government to save the culture, they are advocating the Fuhrer principle whether they know it or not. Those who defend the NEA assume that the art that receives support will, for the most part, be what they think is good art. And if you disagree with the NEA establishment, as I did on the radio one day, you are unenlightened.

22:46And when a staff person from an Iowa congressman asked George Plimpton what Sororians' one-word misspelled poem meant, Plimpton replied, you are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived. You wouldn't understand it anyway. And when Congress sought to eliminate the funding of obfuscinar just a couple of years ago, it was denounced as Philistine. The Supreme Court eventually ruled for the NEA. But the point is, without government intervention, it would not have even been an issue. We would not be asked to take up sides between the First Amendment and morality. Cultural critics of the free market do not want to admit that kitsch will always be sold. Some people have better taste than others. That's just the way life is. It is only the free market, however, that allows those of us who still have taste to seek out those artists that are still doing good work.

23:34Without a free market, the government, in an appeal to the lowest common denominator of voter, will simply institutionalize propaganda, vulgarity and kitsch. Now one does not need to look long and hard to realize that this century has been one of great cultural decline. This is not, however, to be blamed on the free market. It is the centralization of power in the Leviathan state that creates mass society and crushes individuality under its irrepressible weight. Hence, it is the state power and not liberty that is most actively harmed our culture. The solution is obviously not more the same. The solution, however, is simple. Free the market. Shut down the NEA. Abolish public schools. Dismantle the welfare state. Allow individuals to voluntarily come together to form their own societies.

24:21Let culture develop on its own. Only liberty will allow for rekindling the spark of true creativity and appreciation for art that is higher and nobler. And that is why we need the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to pave the way to a culture where individuals are free to live as human beings at peace with God and each other and where men can follow their creator in true creativity.