The Great Myth of the Capitalist Rape of West Virginia

The Democratic Party has gotten a great deal of mileage out of a myth.

West Virginians have a predisposition, due to their brand of Democratic thinking dating back to Andrew Jackson, to mistrust both Big Government and Big Business. They generally vote for whichever ideology seems least threatening to their liberties at the time. Republican opposition to Big Government makes sense nationally while Democratic opposition to Big Business helps Democrats locally.

Democrats in West Virginia look back to history to build their case against those that support capitalism. They cite corporate manipulations of law and culture to purchase millions of acres of land for timber, railroads, and coal, leaving the people with a pittance as a result. THIS, they say, proves the evil of capitalism!

Not so fast. All capitalists are businessmen, but not all businessmen are capitalists. Ronald Lewis, former West Virginia University professor and dean of regional economic historians, wrote in Transforming the Appalachian Countryside that many businessmen involved in industrial and extractive industries sought out the prestide of state sanction for their operations. In the 1870s and 80s Democratic party leaders such as Henry Gassaway Davis and Johnson Camden dominated the business and political affairs of the state.

A famous economist wrote harshly about the business monopolies assisted by the state, talking about "the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind." Was this Karl Marx? No. Frederick Engels? No. Some other vile Communist? No. This was Adam Smith, the first articulator of capitalism, who warned against the alliance of business and government.

Once again we have met the enemy and it is government. All West Virginians have to do is look back in their history, read Wealth of Nations and understand that the problems that occured had nothing to do with the capitalism that Democrats and Michael Moore attack. It has to do with lurking mercantilism, the alliance of some businessmen with the power of government. Build the same kind of wall between capital and business that the ACLU wants between church and state. That would have prevented so many of the economic ills faced now and a hundred years ago.

Mercantilism Is Almost Here

The government is out of control.

This week, the president fired the CEO of General Motors.

Everyone outside of the looniest lefty ought to cringe when the federal government starts hiring and firing private sector employees.

The reasoning given was that the bailout money could only go forward with fresh leadership. Even the Democratic governor of Michigan expressed outrage over this unprecedented move. Almost ignored was the forced merger of Chrysler with Fiat.

Government money gives the government the right to interfere with a private corporation? Maybe so. However, it means that said corporation will be saddled with bad economic decisions made for political reasons. Is it more cost effective to put a new plant in right to work Tennessee or union oriented Pennsylvania? The Democratic powers that be will insist on helping their allies. And since they have so much invested in GM, they would by necessity have to discriminate aaint independent Ford.

Mercantilism means that the government is not a referee, but a player in the economy. As a player, it has interests to defend. Those independent of the government get shut out and honest competition dwindles.

Mercantilism was one of the reasons why America broke free of Britain. We wanted a fair economic system where competition was not rigged. In 1776, Adam Smith called it capitalism. Barack Obama's "change" is leading us full circle back to the bad old days of mercantilism.