Wrestling With Capitalist Pigs - by Philip Klein
"It was in the early part of this decade that I first wrestled with the phenomenon of capitalist pigs. In the public sphere, the wealthy businessman is constantly under attack. He is the cartoonish villain in movies and the scapegoat for opportunistic politicians. But I grew up in a household that celebrated individualism and entrepreneurship. In my family, the businessman was the Randian hero who, purely in pursuit of his own self-interest, invented new technologies, spurred productivity, and generated wealth for the economy—while envious looters and parasites tried to tear him down and bleed him dry.
However, working as a financial journalist from 2001 to 2004 forced me to reexamine this view when a wave of corporate accounting scandals rocked Wall Street, and the arrogance, stupidity, and corruption at a number of large American corporations and at the highest levels of its financial institutions made for an embarrassing display. I began to ask myself: how will I be able to defend capitalism from those who seek to destroy it when actual capitalists are behaving so indefensibly? This is a question that free-market conservatives are now forced to grapple with on a much larger scale in the wake of the collapse of the financial markets." If conservatives err by allowing their ideological commitment to capitalism to make them place too much trust in the actual capitalists, liberals make a mistake by not recognizing that government regulators are also susceptible to corruption, conflicts of interest, and poor judgment.
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