TURBO-CAPITALISM: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan
• Position: Review

TURBO-CAPITALISM: Winners adn Losers in the Global Economy By Edward Luttwak HarperCollins, $26

The free market is less "conservative" than you think

THE NOTION OF A CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE of the market can jar the contemporary mind, a little like a left-wing critique of the state. But that suggests the tenacity of Cold War stereo-types and a media that is conceptually inert. Suspicion of the market is conservative in the most fundamental sense. It can arise from a desire for true economy, as opposed to the wastrel and debt-driven tendencies of the consumer culture. It can express a desire to protect that which is of great value, whether in the social structure or the natural environment, against the machinations of pecuniary gain.

As it sprang from Adam Smith's mind, the concept of the market was deliberately disruptive--a radical force. It served to rout the residues of feudalism--the traditional bonds of locality and community--and clear the way for the industrial age, with its mathematical logic of production and gain. This was not a conservative undertaking. But soon enough it acquired the respectability of money; and this forced true conservatives into the role of radicals, for opposing the radicalism of money which was now the status quo.

In this century, few names evoke more ire in free market circles than those of John Kenneth Galbraith and Ralph Nader. Yet it would be hard to find two people more devoted to the traditional economic verities of hard work, frugality, practicality and thrift. Galbraith, the son of a Scotch-Canadian farmer, took issue with the inherent wastefulness of the postwar consumer economy. If it took a massive advertising industry (over $200 billion today) to maintain what economists quaintly call "demand", he wrote, then perhaps that spending wasn't as urgent as market theory posits. Perhaps the time had come to shift some of those resources to undertakings for which the need is indisputably great--parks, schools, decaying inner cities, and the like.

Nader looked at products the way Henry Ford did--from the standpoint of practicality and sound engineering. He argued that technology such as automobiles should be, first and foremost, functional and safe. (Ford resisted style changes and selling on credit.) But there are grandfather rights in the wars of ideological cliche. Those who claim first the imprimatur of state policy get title to the mantle of "conservative".

So people like Galbraith and Nader were excoriated as proto-statists, and also as "Puritans" and economic "prudes", as though the traditional values of our Pilgrim forebears are somehow disreputable when applied to the economic realm.

Among those who identify themselves as conservatives, concern about the market has focused mainly on the social structure. Such writers tend to hold the market in wary and ambiguous embrace. Yes, it provides a channel for invention and enterprise, which are forms of freedom. Yes, it is a bulwark against the state. But it also degrades what it touches and is corrosive of traditional values and mores.

In the 1950s, Russell Kirk sounded these themes gently in his magisterial The Conservative Mind, in which he called the automobile the "mechanical Jacobin" Around the same time, Wilhelm Roepke, a compatriot of Hayek and von Mises, the libertarian icons, wrote a book called The...