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put it a bit vulgarly, he is obsessed by the power of trade-union lead–
ers and terrified of the political consequences of that power, whereas
Gilder seems to be obsessed by the destructive impact of the welfare
state on the family life of the poor and terrified of the sexual conse–
quences. I can think of no English writer who has ever defended cap–
italism on the grounds that it makes for sexual potency and rein–
forces religious belief. Whether this reflects any interesting or
important differences in the two societies is quite unclear; but, for
what it's worth, it is noticeable that Britain hasn't produced any
equivalent to Daniel Bell's thesis that capitalism devours its own
(Puritan) moral capital and leads by degrees to "Porntopia," and
that a book such as Gertrude Himmelfarb' s
On Liberty and Liberalism,
which attacks Mill's feminism and liberalism as if they were the
operating theory of 42nd Street's bookstores and cinemas, looks to
an English eye not so much mistaken as
odd.
We do, of course, have
public moralists in plenty-Ronald Butt's political commentary in
the
Times
was frequently given over to complaining of the flourish–
ing state of the pornography trade-but our moralists are not
exactly gung ho for capitalism, and the enthusiasts for capitalism
defend it in straightforward terms.
It
is prosperity they approve; it is
trade unions they fear ; they extend their anxieties to the political
consequences of economic decline or trade-union hegemony; they
don ' t aspire deeper or higher.
I say this out of no desire to dismiss Gilder as ill-bred, merely
obsessive , or anything of the sort.
l#!alth and Poverty
is certainly an
interesting book, and a good read; its most obvious parent seems to
be Schumpeter's
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,
and you could
hardly be better begotten than that. In the same way that
Schumpeter's book presupposed a lot of economic theory but was
essentially a piece of historical and sociological speculation on the
grand scale , so Gilder' s
l#!alth and Poverty
relies on some fairly con–
tentio1:ls fragments of economic theory but endeavors to turn
Schumpeter's history inside out. That is, where Schumpeter held
that the process of "creative destruction" by which capitalism
advanced was coming to an end as managers and bureaucrats
replaced entrepreneurs and the laissez-faire state, Gilder argues that
Schumpeter, like too many other economists, took a static picture for
the whole truth about a capitalist economy, by mistaking the current
state of large companies for a sign of their future dominance and not
seeing it for what it is-a sign of their former vigor. The natural
