Commerce is good for minorities, too. If you don’t like the outcome of an election you have to lump it; if you don’t like your hairdresser, you can find another. Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs. The other day I bought a device for attaching a fly-fishing rod to my car. How long would I have had to wait in 1970s Leningrad before some central planner had the bright idea of supplying such a trivial need? The market found it. Moreover, thanks to the internet, the economy is getting better and better at meeting the desires of minorities. Because the very few people in the world who need fishing rod attachments or books on fourteenth-century suicide can now find suppliers on the web, niches are thriving. The ‘long tail’ of the distribution – the very many products that are each wanted by very few, rather than vice versa – can be serviced more and more easily.
Freedom itself owes much to commerce. The great drive to universal suffrage, religious tolerance and female emancipation began with pragmatic enthusiasts for free enterprise, like Ben Franklin, and was pressed forward by the urban bourgeoisie as a response to economic growth. Right into the twentieth century tsars and general secretaries found it an awful lot easier to dictate a tyranny of peasants than a demos of bourgeois consumers. Parliamentary reform began in Britain in the 1830s because of the grotesque under-representation of the growing manufacturing towns. Even Marx was subsidised by Engels’s father’s textile mill. It was the now-unfashionable philosopher Herbert Spencer who insisted that freedom would increase along with commerce. ‘My aim,’ he wrote in 1842 (anticipating John Stuart Mill by nine years), ‘is the liberty of each limited alone by the like liberty of all.’ Yet he foresaw that the battle to persuade leaders not to believe in coercion was far from over: ‘Though we no longer coerce men for their spiritual good, we still think ourselves called upon to coerce them for their material good: not seeing that the one is as unwarrantable as the other.’ The inherent illiberalism of the bureaucracy, not to mention its tendency to corruption and extravagance, was a threat Spencer warned against in vain.
A century later, the gradual dismantling of apartheid and segregation was helped by commercialisation, too. The American civil rights movement drew its strength partly from a great economic migration. More African-Americans left the South between 1940 and 1970 than Poles, Jews, Italians or Irish had arrived in America as immigrants during their great migrations. Lured by better jobs or displaced by mechanical cotton pickers, black share-croppers came to the cities of the industrial North and began to discover their economic and political voice. They then began to challenge the system of prejudice and discrimination they had left behind. The first victory along that road was an exercise in consumer power – the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–6.
The sexual and political liberation of women in the 1960s followed directly their domestic liberation from the kitchen by labour-saving electrical machinery. Lower-class women had always worked for wages – tilling in fields, sewing in sweatshops, serving in parlours. Among the upper-middle classes, though, it was a badge of rank, handed down from the feudal past, to be or to have a non-working (or at least housekeeping) wife. In the 1950s many suburban men, returning from war, found they too could afford such an accessory, and many women were pressured into giving their battleship-welding jobs back to men. In the absence of economic change, that is probably how it would have stayed, but soon the opportunities to work outside the home grew as the time spent on increasingly mechanised housework dwindled, and it was this, as much as any political awakening, that enabled the feminist movement to gain traction in the 1960s.
The lesson of the last two centuries is that liberty and welfare march hand in hand with prosperity and trade. Countries that lose their liberty to tyrants today, through military coups, are generally experiencing falling per capita income at an average rate of 1.4 per cent at the time – just as it was falling per capita income that helped turn Russia, Germany and Japan into dictatorships between the two world wars. One of the great puzzles of history is why this did not happen in America in the 1930s, where on the whole pluralism and tolerance not only survived the severe economic shocks of the 1930s, but thrived. Perhaps it nearly did happen: Father Coughlin tried, and had Roosevelt been more ambitious or the constitution weaker, who knows where the New Deal might have led? Perhaps some democracies were just strong enough for their values to survive. Today there is much argument about whether democracy is necessary for growth, China seeming to prove that it is not. But there can be little doubt that China would – indeed may yet – see either more revolution or more repression if its growth rate were to fall to nothing.
I am happy to cheer, with Deirdre McCloskey: ‘Hurrah for late twentieth-century enrichment and democratisation. Hurrah for birth control and the civil rights movement. Arise ye wretched of the earth’. Interdependence through the market made these things possible. Politically, as Brink Lindsey has diagnosed, the coincidence of wealth with toleration has led to the bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its social consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they come. ‘One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.’
Contrary to the cartoon, it was commerce that freed people from narrow materialism, that gave them the chance to be different. Much as the intelligentsia continued to despise the suburbs, it was there that tolerance and community and voluntary organisation and peace between the classes flourished; it was there that the refugees from cramped tenements and tedious farms became rights-conscious consumers – and parents of hippies. For it was in the suburbs that the young, seizing their economic independence, did something other than meekly follow father and mother’s advice. By the late 1950s, teenagers were earning as much as whole families had in the early 1940s. It was this prosperity that made Presley, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Brando and Dean resonate. It was the mass affluence of the 1960s (and the trust funds it generated) that made possible the dream of free-love communes. Just as material progress subverts the economic order, so it also subverts the social order – ask Osama bin Laden, the ultimate spoilt rich kid.
The corporate monster
Yet for all the liberating effects of commerce, most modern commentators see a far greater threat to human freedom from the power of corporations that free markets inevitably throw up. The fashionable cultural critic sees himself or herself as David slinging stones at vast, corrupt and dehumanising Goliath-like corporations that punish, pollute and profiteer with impunity. To my knowledge, no large company has yet featured in a Hollywood movie without its boss embarking on a sinister plot to kill people (in the latest one I watched, Tilda Swinton somewhat predictably tried to kill George Clooney for exposing her company’s poisoning of people with pesticides). I hold no brief for large corporations, whose inefficiencies, complacencies and anti-competitive tendencies often drive me as crazy as the next man. Like Milton Friedman, I notice that ‘business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.’ They are addicted to corporate welfare, they love regulations that erect barriers to entry to their small competitors, they yearn for monopoly and they grow flabby and inefficient with age.
But I detect that the criticism is increasingly out of date, and that large corporations are ever more vulnerable to their nimbler competitors in the modern world – or would be if they were not granted special privileges by the state. Most big firms are actually becoming frail, fragile and frightened – of the press, of pressure groups, of government, of their customers. So they should be. Given how frequently they vanish – by take-over or bankruptcy – this is hardly surprising. Coca-Cola may wish its customers were ‘serfs under feudal brandlords’, in the words of one critic,