Two Cheers for Capitalism, A Call for Balance

A capitalistic society does not want more than two cheers for itself.  Indeed, it regards the impulse to give three cheers for any social, economic, or political system as expressing a dangerous – because it is misplaced – enthusiasm.

Irving Kristol (1920-2009), Two Cheers for Capitalism, Basic Books, 1975

Why not three cheers? Why any cheers at all?

After all, capitalism’s excesses do many appall.

The answer, is that overall, above all capitalism works,

While collectivism, or social welfare-ism , is for clerks,

Who think they know best how to set bureacratic rules,

But  too often think of others as unelightened mules.

Yet clerks know little about generating wealth,

And even less about what makes for health.

President Kennedy said capitalism can lift everyone's boat,

That it is efficient in redistributing social goods that float.

The social welfare state may glow for the ideologue,

But ideologues get lost in mystical anti-business fog.

They tend to think other people’s money is their own,

That it is on loan and can be thrown from their throne.

That  it grows willynilly from taproots of centralized trees,

That government can seize from others what it pleases.

So government gets caught up in idealistic enthusiasm,

It believes  it is  part and parcel of society’s cytoplasm.

The problem is that gov does not perform,

When it strives and seeks society to reform.

It gravitates towards the iron tyranny of the D.C. status quo,

Individuals, innovators, and entrepreneurs become the foe,

As social welfare and government dependency grows,

Government debt mounts and the economy suffers woes.

It all boils down to a question of lack of political balance,

Of  monetary dys-equilibrium  to use economic parlance.

So two cheers for capitalism, when and where it  is needed

One cheer for social equity, when capitalism needs to be weeded.

Two cheers for market-driven health care,

One  cheer for a central  system deemed “fair.”

Two cheers for a direct doctor-patient relationship,

One cheer for intervening third party one-upsmanship.

Two cheers for a simpler, understandable  health narrative.

One cheer for a complex confusing healthcare.gov imperative

Tweet:   The health system badly needs a better balance between market and health needs of consumers and demands of a protective government.