302
PARTISAN REVIEW
cycle of the capitalist firm is such that, unless the system of taxation
and the moral attitude to risk get in the way, big and ponderous
organizations that can offer only security to their managers will be
undercut and eventually destroyed by smaller and livelier enter–
prises under the control of entrepreneurial types to whom security
matters less than the chance of success . There isn't any real danger
that "creative destruction" will cease of its own accord, and there
isn't any real danger that psychological or political processes that are
genuinely and deterministically linked to capitalist innovation will
slow it down or stop it.
All this makes the operations of a capitalist economy a moral
matter in two ways. The first is that it allows us a moral choice as to
whether we have a capitalist economy or some other, so that any
defender of capitalism needs to have some moral arguments on its
behalf. The second is that public morality as well as individual
morale makes all the difference to whether an economy will work
effectively, so that there is an interesting sociological issue to be
raised about how this morality is to be inculcated.
Gilder's defense of capitalism isn't novel, save in its obsession
with the sexual behavior of the divorced, the unemployed , and the
poor; essentially he argues the old case that
of
course
there is enor–
mous inequality under capitalism, but, crucially, people don't stay
poor, the children of the poor often flourish, and if the system looks
at any instant like a pyramid, its appearance over time is indescrib–
able in such terms. Individuals make life-cycle gains and losses,
groups as a whole rise and fall, and the entire system produces more
and more wealth. The attractions of the standard American story,
though, go deeper than that; because the immigrant entrepreneur
who fights his way to prosperity does so by using all the resources of
his family, the system naturally reinforces family solidarity. Men
with families can work harder and do work harder; and the man who
combines success in his job with the sexual and emotional stability
offered by his family is the really happy man. (I need hardly say how
much any feminist will dislike
T#alth and Poverty,
but even the non–
feminist may flinch a bit at the casualness with which Gilder
assumes that a successful male head of a family is the moral equiva–
lent of a successful family.)
Moreover, the entrepreneur isn't a merely selfish figure; he is a
giver as well as a receiver. One novelty of Gilder's account is his
enthusiasm for Say's Law-he doesn't merely defend it as a useful
piece of economic theory, but makes it into a moral principle: in pro-
