Article content continued

But only capitalism will generate economic growth and greater prosperity, because only it can enlist enthusiastic participation by much of society. Yet it is also in the nature of capitalism that it is unable to resist the temptation to imprudent pursuit of enhanced gain. This invariably leads to corrective periods, sometimes very destructive ones, of which the present may perhaps be an example.

Dispensing with the invincible engine of capitalism is the first problem of the Leapers. The second problem is their disturbingly naive faith in government. Governments always step in when capitalism goes off the rails. Only they can, admittedly, since they make and enforce the laws and control the money supply and there is no one else to try to sort out these debacles. But that does not mean that governments have any aptitude for this; they almost never do. They are more incompetent than businessmen and immediately proclaim that all such economic downturns are the result of private greed. In fact they are the result of governments not using their authority wisely to prevent excesses, as in the stock market bubble of the ’20s and the real estate bubble from the ’90s to 2008.

The authors of this manifesto actually believe governments could be found who could implement their revolutionary program; that governments do a better job for the majority of people when they impose mass changes of occupation, found and close whole industries, and direct how and where people live; and that a state authority so idealistically conceived can be transmitted into positive action. This is a complete and overwhelmingly demonstrable falsehood. Governments can govern legitimately because they are elected and have a legal apparatus to prop them up, but they are very largely venal and incompetent, far beyond what prevails in the private sector, where scoundrels and failures cannot cling to what Shakespeare called “the insolence of office.”