piggybank pinko

These 1940s capitalism cartoons (1, 2) reminded me to check up on our old friend over at www.Captain-Capitalism.com.

When I first encountered this muscle-bound icon of economic illiteracy, I wrote about it here and on blog.Mises:

The good and funny folks at Powerhouse Animation have brought us a new, schizophrenic version of the square-jawed, patriotic superhero[...]

Check out the "Economy" animation in which Captain-Capitalism explains to us that the health of the economy is based on spending readily -- but only with domestic producers.

Oh well, what can you expect from a flag-worshipper with a nuclear pistol?

Well, he's at it again:

I was an ardent advocate of the free market as an ethical principle long before I accepted captitalism as an economic blessing, a practical strategy toward general prosperity.

It was only 3 years ago that I was still struggling with the big C. A domain name that I reserved but then abandoned as it became less accurate was www.ReluctantCapitalist.com.

At the time, I was watching Ric Burns's documentary on New York. (Ric and Ken Burns are both documentarians, and both devout Hamiltonians, as it turns out. That's really all you have to know to make any sense out of Ken Burns's Civil War film.)

At the same time that I was watching the New York documentary, I was discovering Mises.org (after having listened to the audiobook version of Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson.) These Austrians were the most ideologically pure pro-capitalists I'd encountered. As much or more so than Ayn Rand and much more palatable to me -- plus, the Austrians seemed extremely focused on history, which appealed to me.

Meanwhile, on the New York documentary, the message of the earliest episodes was clear: Hamilton, Hamilton, Hamilton!

What was puzzling, however, was that everyone was describing Hamilton's economic philosophy as "capitalism"! New York City was supposedly the result of mixing Hamiltonian capitalism with a thousand different ethnicities.

From the Austrians, on the other hand, I was learning that Hamilton was the enemy of free-market capitalism, that capitalism understood ideologically as the private ownership of the means of production was incompatible with Hamilton's system of central banking, public debt, and corporate welfare. What Hamilton was promoting was an American version of the British mercantilism that Adam Smith had debunked in The Wealth of Nations. Just what exactly was this Ric Burns character trying to pull?

The Republicans have been rightwing Keynesians since President "We are all Keynesians now" Nixon. Supplyside economics is rightwing Keynesiansism. It's all about a government-managed economy. It's all about spend, spend, spend, where the glory of true capitalism is in saving and investing, in the increased structure of capital and the increased division of labor. (I'm not going to worry here about how those things get distorted by the fractional-reserve business cycle.)

The maker(s) of Captain Capitalism clearly think that the Republicans speak for capitalism. "Piggybank Pinko" is a funny attack on Keynesianism that (I'm pretty sure) thinks it's an attack on capitalism.