Mencken on Capitalism

     What we confront is not the failure of capitalism, but simply the failure of democracy.  Capitalism has really been responsible for all the progress of the modern age.  Better than any other system ever devised, it provides leisure for large numbers of superior men, and so fosters the arts and sciences. No other system ever heard of is so beneficial to invention.  Its fundamental desire for gain may be far from glorious per se, but it at least furthers improvement in all the departments of life.  We owe to it every innovation that makes life secure and comfortable.
     Unfortunately, like any other human institution (for example Holy Church), capitalism tends to run amuck when it is not restrained, and democracy provides inadequate means of keeping it in order. There is never any surety that democracy will throw up leaders competent to discern the true dangers of capitalism and able to remedy them in a prudent and rational manner.  Thus we have vacillated between letting it run wild and trying to ruin it.  Both courses are hazardous and ineffective, and it is hard to say which is more so.


      Thus sayeth H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, in "Minority Report",  a collection of his notebooks published shortly after his death in 1956. How Uncle Jack wishes Mencken was still with us and commenting in his inimitable fashion on the events of the day, especially in the realm of capitalism and its discontents.  What would he have to say, he wonders, about the likes of  Geithner, Bernanke, Summers, and Obama who are struggling to contain the disaster perpetrated by the latest group of capitalists to "run amuck"?  What language would he use to excoriate the greedy Wall Street bankers who have brought us to this parlous state?  It would be fun to read the Baltimore Sun again, that's for sure.