ATTACKS on the economics of free enterprise (that successful way of improving the lot of human beings that pre-dates the abject failure of socialism by millennia) are still attacks, whether cloaked in environmentalism, anti-globalisation, saving the planet, climate change fears, or any other fashionable politically correct causes that claim the moral high ground. For the politically correct, when business and the profit making exist, bureaucrats armed with swinging tax and other regulations must police them.
The assumption seems to be that those who pursue profit are all immoral rampant beasts. Given half a chance, they will screw the poor, pollute the environment, and chisel their customers by providing inferior goods.
Granted, there are some bad eggs. Let the law deal with them. To assume automatically that everyone in the basket is the same is bizarre indeed, yet is often claimed. And there does seem to be a degree of envy among banner-waving activists who, given the option, most likely would jump at an offer of a steady corporate job.
The conclusions of historians, who do not seek facts that fit an ideology, lessen bad opinions of profit-seekers. They conclude that until there were factories and intensive farming, population growth led inevitably to famine. The only way out of grinding rural poverty and hunger was a city job; hence, the large-scale move from country to town.
The industrial revolution fully deserved its name. Did it provide instant wealth? Was there instant equality? No, of course not. This revolution was grafted on to a semi-feudal society, but it was the beginning of a far better life for all.
Governments did not bring about these changes. Those who came to the cities of 18th century Britain did live in appalling conditions, but it was businessmen, not governments, bishops, politicians, and judges, that ameliorated them.
Those who had made great fortunes were often morally upright religious dissenters such as Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists. They were the captains of industry of their day. They were the people who provided charitable housing, free hospitals, orphanages, schools, and free passages to the new worlds of America and Australia. This was highly moral behaviour, even if there was a degree of self-interest and conscience involved.
Take the Clapham Sect, led by William Wilberforce. It is credited with first getting the slave trade abolished and then slavery made illegal throughout the British empire. It was made up of very wealthy people who got their income from profits derived from farming and from trade.
Sect members included the chairman of the British East India Company, an estate manager, a brewer, the governor-general of India and another colonial governor, a banker, and an economist.
There were various clergymen, academics, authors and two MPs. By no stretch of the imagination can these moral people be described as anti-profit or anti-capital, let alone working class. Indeed, without their private incomes or their considerable leisure time the anti-slavery movement would not have won its cause.
So where is the lack of private sector morality in all this? Morality certainly existed. The anti-slavery lobby was financed by private enterprise profits, the Corn Laws that kept the price of bread artificially high, was fought tooth and nail by business.
Was that not a moral thing to do? Can all morality be cynically discounted because of the occupations of those who behave morally? Not in a rational universe.
The assumption that morality is unknown in the private sector is ignorant as well as insulting. To assume that business is blind and uncaring towards what is happening outside factory gates, or within them, is itself a form of blighted vision.
Sensible businessmen see every person as a potential customer. Without customers, there is no profit, no dividends to shareholders, no funding of pensions, no wages, and no salaries. Morality in business may be enlightened self-interest, but it is morality none the less. Business and poverty are opposites. As Henry Ford proved, poor wages make poor consumers.
Our own history will record that the internal fight against apartheid, while lacking the glamour of berets and rifles, was considerably funded by businesses through the Urban Foundation and donations to thousands of non-government organisations that formed the backbone of the now-defunct United Democratic Front,.
It will also note that the long and consistent opposition to apartheid by Anglo American – that owned a huge chunk of the South African private sector – was a major factor in apartheid’s undoing. It is difficult not to see that most of those millions of our fellow citizens who patiently queue for welfare payments would, if asked, prefer a job rather than a handout.
Can governments or politicians provide jobs? Well yes, but without the private profit-driven sector to make the money to pay the taxes that provide them, such jobs are unsustainable, to say the least.
Can the private sector produce equality in society when successful companies pay more than smaller ones can afford? If a storeman is paid as much as a manager, and vice-versa, what is the point of either working hard? If government ministers get bigger salaries than backbench MPs, it is unequal, but it is not immoral.
Instead of being subject to moans about profit, capitalism, and inequality, the private sector should be given every encouragement to grow the economy and the tax base, for without such growth, and the jobs that will come with it, grinding rural poverty in South Africa will continue, as in Britain before 1750.
On a crowded moral high ground, the private sector deserves a special place.
Keith Bryer is a retired communications consultant.