Are capitalists cheats? I pose this question because of a recent article in the New York Times by the novelist Sam Lipsyte. In the piece he writes that a new version of the board game Monopoly has a tower with an infrared sensor to stop cheating. The author says: “Our capitalist system has always harboured cheats, catapulted them through loopholes into riches and glory” and “. . . the Big Cheat, the entire matrix of money and land and development and investment that’s already locked down . . .” His remarks remind me of those by an earlier writer, Honoré de Balzac: “Behind every great fortune is a crime.” Sadly, I think in the wake of the banking and property collapse, the view that the whole economy is rigged in favour of crooks is worryingly common.
Of course, the western system of free enterprise is far from perfect – the benefits are not spread entirely equally and there are winners and losers. But the alternatives are surely worse, as events in the Middle East have recently proved. The collapse there of autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and, potentially, in Libya were triggered by a young man who set fire to himself because he was denied the freedom to sell his fruit on a stall and make a profit from his entrepreneurship. Official corruption, the absence of proper title to property and the weak rule of law mean these states really did operate without the framework to reward merit and hard work.
I have travelled widely in the Middle East, because my wife comes from there, and my experience has been that ordinary Arab citizens do not lack ingenuity or ambition. They want to better themselves, just like people in the west, but in many nations they are never offered the education, rights and opportunities that we take for granted. Since growth and prosperity has been denied the majority of these populations, so their frustrations have boiled over in the various revolutions. According to Time magazine, 15 per cent of young Arabs hope to start their own business within the next year. But how can you do that in a country where bribes and connections matter far more than hard work or ability?