They'll Come Back Home

Twenty years ago Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History to be at hand with the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism.

Charles Murray argues that this consensus has crumbled:

"Capitalist" has become an accusation. The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.

Mr. Murray attributes the negative attitude toward capitalism to several factors:

the prevalence of crony capitalism, i.e., winners win by pulling strings with friends in high places;

the accumulation of fabulous wealth through financial legerdemain;

the many successful liberal capitalists, such as those here in the Bay Area, who won't defend the system through which they produced their wealth;

the segregation of capitalism from virtue, i.e., "The freedom to act and a stern moral obligation to act in certain ways were seen as two sides of the same American coin. Little of that has survived."

This humble observer is not as pessimistic as Mr. Murray. The alternative to capitalism is statism. The crises of the past decade swept statists into power throughout the West, and they were given rein to implement their pet solutions to major problems. For the most part they failed.

Capitalism in practice always looks bad compared to other "-isms" in theory. Now that citizens have had a chance to see how the alternatives operate in the real world, they'll come back home.