Rickerism

I had the opportunity to read Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (Knopf: 2002). I highly recommend it. Muller gives a great overview of key philosophers and their impact on capitalism. I took away a key conclusion: The essence of capitalism and its success does not change because man does not change.

In chapter four, Muller discusses Justus Möser, an 18th century German philosopher.

The status of the artisan, Möser believed, was now being undermined by the international market and its local agent, the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper imported goods form beyond Osnabrück and sold them in his shop. These goods came from London, Paris, and big cities in Germany, where they were produced by a process of division of labor that Möser called “simplification”… In place of the guilded master artisan who worked with a few apprentices and journeymen, this new style of production involved a master who employed thirty or forty wage laborers…Goods produced by this process could be sold more cheaply…The products of “simplification”, Möser recognized, were often better and less expensive than those produced by the hometown artisan. And so the artisan was increasingly displaced by the shopkeeper…

Time and again Möser condemned the growing taste for new, imported commodities, especially among the lower ranks. Even a beggar now considered coffee, tea and sugar among his basic needs, Möser wrote with polemical exaggeration. He shared the common mercantilist concern with the balance of trade, and sought to discourage the growing taste for imports…

When I read this passage, I was struck by how familiar Möser’s arguments sounded to me. Why, they are the exact arguments one hears leveled against Wal-mart. It is ironic. Möser was trying to stop the shopkeeper from displacing the local artisan with better, less expensive goods. Now people use Möser’s same arguments to stop Wal-mart from displacing the local shopkeeper.