You've probably watched it and you'll probably watch it again. A Christmas Carol is looping on cable along with the other classic Christmas movies.
Over the years I've watched the George C. Scott version several times. Something always unsettled me about the story, and I just now can put my finger on it: the entire premise that Scrooge and his dead partner, Marley, did not provide good for their fellow creatures is just wrong. The underlying theme is economically unsound and historically inaccurate. It all adds to our general misunderstanding of free market capitalism.
That theme? Whenever we focus too much on our own material welfare we cause harm to or deprive others of good.
To this we can assuredly reply, Bah-Humbug!
The scene with the apparition of Marley, Scrooge's erstwhile business partner, sets this errant premise upon which the entire transformation of Scrooge takes place.
Here is a clip of the scene:
Leaving aside the complete lack of Biblical evidence of Marley's quasi-purgatorial punishment (introduced, in all places, in a literary work constructed around the celebratory season of Christ's incarnation), think about what Marley conveys to Scrooge about his time on earth as a successful businessman of market enterprise:
"Business?! Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business...The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"We are being told Marley's life of pursuing a profit and focusing his energies primarily therein neglected mankind.
Bah-Humbug! As Walter E. Williams says, if you want to help your fellow man go earn a profit providing them what they want and need.
Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been viewed as a rebuke of the industrial capitalism of the 1800s. Marley's ill-founded remarks could easily be the reason for this view.
Given that Marley and Scrooge's efforts took place during a relatively free period in English history wherein countless hordes of people were further removed from the hand-to-mouth existence that had plagued society for, well, ever, their business activities contributed a great deal of good to society, even if that good was not directly observed. Dickens' novel takes place in Victorian England, a time when a burgeoning population had its material welfare provided by the workings of industrial capitalism. That "comprehensive ocean" of business involved many thousands of unseen affects; a market, after all, involves more people, decisions, actions, and ripple effects than immediately meets the eye.
Marley seems to believe his efforts and time were compartmentalized and not part of a larger whole out of which many thousands of positive economic activities took place. In short, he focused on himself and thereby did not help mankind. Since no one earns a profit in a bubble, Marley and Scrooge got "rich" by devoting their time to facilitating one part of the larger mechanism of the market of satisfying the wants and needs of the consumers.
And who were the consumers in Victorian England after which businessmen scurried to satisfy in their respective pursuit of individual wealth? The masses of people who in the pre-capitalist times were doomed to life sentences of serfdom and beggary. And the first thing the masses wanted were to no longer be masses of poor, wretched serfs. (Indoor plumbing, leisure time, electricity, and cheese-filled hot dogs all came along later.)
In 2010 we consumers want new apps for our Apple I Phones; back then they wanted apples to keep from starving. What's the difference between then and now? Capitalism has continued to allow some of us to provide the rest of us what we want, resulting in unbelievable standards of living, in spite of all the government intervention.
Mises reminds us:
"The greatness of the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the first World War consisted precisely in the fact that the social ideal after the realization of which the most eminent men were striving was free trade in a peaceful world of free nations. It was an age of unprecedented improvement in the standard of living for a rapidly increasing population. It was the age of [classical] liberalism."The movie ends with Scrooge merrily contributing to philanthropic ventures. The narrator comments that Scrooge went on to be society's foremost benefactor and so on and so on. That's all good but what is left open-ended is whether or not he resumed his business enterprises and continued to provide for a common good not immediately seen and tangible. If he quit cold turkey under the assumption he could do more good by dissipating his accumulated wealth for philanthropic good before his eyes, much unseen good would have been withheld from society at large.
And if that were the case, Scrooge well deserves our hearty Bah-Humbug!
