Anyway, it’s left to the sensible, hardworking, put-upon Shylock to do the banking for these jerks, and if he gets carried away with his loan default penalty clause who can blame him?
Maybe literature hates capitalism because sensible, hardworking, put-upon people—unless they go nuclear like Shylock—are boring to write about.
Anyway, wide is the gate and broad is the way from Shakespeare’s Shylock to Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
The charge against Scrooge is merely that he’s a lonely old man who works too hard, pays the going wage, and is skeptical about the merits of private philanthropy. We hear nothing about the glories performed by his accumulated capital—financing highways, canals, railroads, workshops, factories, business establishments, dwelling houses, and, perhaps, start-ups doing biotech research into what ails Tiny Tim.
In return for Scrooge’s beneficence to society Dickens inflicts dreadful nightmares on him. (Although I’m not sure the apparition of Marley is as scary to Scrooge as Dickens wants it to be. Marley’s ghost is, after all, chained to Marley’s money boxes—so maybe you can take it with you.)
Then, at the end of the story, Dickens still isn’t done torturing his innocent victim. He has Scrooge suffer a mental breakdown, a terrifying manic episode where Scrooge “walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure.”
Poor Bob Cratchit doubtless had to have Ebenezer confined to Bedlam.
And off to the loony bin of anticapitalism with you, too, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In The Great Gatsby, a successful businessman is shown to be a howitzer among cap pistols, especially compared to the dribbling squirt gun of a narrator, Nick Carraway. Tom and Daisy Buchanan are trust fund twits. Everyone else is a nonentity.
It’s Jay Gatsby who throws the fabulous parties, has the great love affair, and spends piles of money so everybody else can have fun.
That money came from somewhere. Probably from Gatsby’s intelligence and diligent effort. As to the money coming from bootlegging, we have only the worthless Tom Buchanan’s word to go on about that. And bootlegging requires intelligence and diligent effort (and capital) too. Also, Fitzgerald would have been writing about the “Boring Twenties” if it hadn’t been for bathtub gin.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule of literature hating capitalism. There are novels, plays, and even poems about the blessings of economic liberty and the fact that private property is the basis of human freedom. But these works are rarely taught in school.
Maybe this is because the teachers are afraid to be politically incorrect. More likely it’s because most pro-capitalist literature stinks.
My college-age daughter managed to find some. I got a text from her: “i LOVE this paperback im reading cause i got bored with my eng lit homework and it was laying around the dorm lounge and its called the fountainhead by somebody named ayn sp? rand and have u ever heard of her?”
I can’t stand Ayn Rand and her fulsome overargument of the blatantly obvious. But I’m not twenty. Actually, it’s an appropriate book for a youngster immersed in the groupthink liberal-quibble, squishy, faux-communal world of academia.
The Fountainhead is wildly romantic. Genius architect Howard Roark—a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright with a libertarian hair up his ass—would rather pull the world down around his head than submit to the diktat of collectivist architectural mediocrity.
In fact, given the fiery romance between Roark and Dominique Francon (Ayn in thin—and better-looking—disguise), The Fountainhead is even a bit of a bodice ripper. But what really gets torn to pieces is the shabby economic underwear beneath the fine fabric of good literature.
So my daughter will also like Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is another lousy book. But it has what’s among the best plot premises ever as capitalism’s creative geniuses all go on strike.
Twenty-five years ago my wife and I took the Trans-Siberian Railway across the former Soviet Union. The country hadn’t recovered from communism. (And much of it hasn’t yet.) The cities, towns, and farms were a gloomy, depressing mess.
My wife grew up in the conventionally conservative capitalist milieu of suburban Connecticut. But until our trip to Russia she hadn’t been particularly interested in political economics. She took Atlas Shrugged along to read on the trip (mostly on the theory of “long ride, long book”). And she kept glancing up from the pages and looking out the train window and saying, “So that’s what happened to this country!”
Or if you prefer your pro-capitalist reading to be set in the dank past rather than the ghastly present or grim future there’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain.
This is arguably Twain’s worst work. It’s haphazardly plotted, sloppily written, and the comedy is force-fed. But, again, the premise is brilliant.
The manager of a New England factory, with all his mechanical and entrepreneurial skills, time travels to the Middle Ages where ignorance, superstition, and a violent aristocracy rule. Also everything turns out to be filthy dirty back then. The Connecticut Yankee shows the Knights of the Round Table how to keep their table from wobbling and another thing or two.
Twain reminds his readers (if a little too often) how much the world owes to free enterprise, ingenuity, reason, scientific inquiry, and all the other wonderful things that have happened since people escaped serfdom and slavery and became self-actuated and self-interested (hence capitalist) individuals.
There is, I’m glad to say, at least one work of pro-capitalist literature that is literature, even though today it would be categorized as YA fiction, and any child who actually likes to read keeps as far away from that section of the library as possible lest a terrifying copy of Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go be thrust upon him or her. Furthermore, its author stands so notoriously accused of being imperialist, colonialist, and racist that an attempt at a
