The Cost of Displacement.

• Author: Berry, Wendell
• Position: Poverty and unemployment - Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC failures involve moral issues of the gravest sort. An essentially immoral system of economy-as-finance, or an economy run by the sole standard of monetary profit, has been allowed to flourish to the point of catastrophe by a fairly general consent to the proposition that economy and morality are two professional specialties which either do not converge or can be made to converge by a simple moral manipulation that turns greed into a cardinal virtue.

We've been told by economists that greed is the exclusive motive in every choice--that, for example, the only way to have good professors or good doctors is to pay them a lot of money.

The error here is the assumption that everybody can be greedy up to some ill-defined limit--that, once you have made greed a virtue, it will not crowd out other virtues such as temperance or justice or charity. The virtuously greedy perhaps would agree to let one another be greedy, so long as one person's greed did not interfere with the greed of another person. This would be the Golden Rule of greedy persons, who no doubt would thank God for it.

But that rule appears to be honored entirely in the breach. There are still a good many people who choose or accept a vocation that will not make them rich--many teachers, for instance, and most writers. But for the greedy there appears to be no such concept as greedy enough . The greedy consume the poor, the moderately prosperous, and each other with the same relish and with an ever-growing appetite.

The second flaw is the assumption that we can restrict the honor of virtuehood to greed alone, leaving the other sins to pine away in customary disfavor. But anger, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth have been staples of commerce long enough already to be taken for granted. The sins, like the virtues, are inclined to enjoy one another's company.

To elevate greed is to confess to depravity, which is what "the economy" is--a ramshackle, propped-up, greed-enforced anti-economy that is delusional, vicious, wasteful, destructive, hard-hearted, and so fundamentally dishonest as to have resorted finally to "trading" in various pure-nothings. Might it not have been better and safer to have assumed that there is no partition between economy and morality, that the test of both is practicality, and that morality is long-term practicality?

T he problem with "the economy" is not only that it is anti-economic, destructive of the natural and human bases of any authentic economy; but that k has been out of control for a long time. At the root of our problem, we now need to suppose, is industrialism and the Industrial Revolution itself. As the original Luddites saw dearly and tightly; the purpose of industrialism from the first has been to replace human...