Ebenezer Scrooge, Conservative
by David Atkins
For your holiday pleasure
A Republican would defend himself by saying that the liberals in the story were asking for charity rather than for increased government services. But after all, if charity had been sufficient to the need in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there would have been no need for the modern welfare state, would there? To say nothing of the fact that leaving the nature social services to the whims of the charitable is a very bad idea, anyway. The Republican model of charity for social services has already been tried–and it failed miserably. That’s why most decent societies have moved beyond it.
And yet, conservative economists today write in defense of Mr. Scrooge:
Dickens’s ignorance of basic economics would, if acted upon by Scrooge, have produced adverse consequences for Cratchit himself. Had Ebeneezer paid Cratchit a higher salary for his work, he [Scrooge] would very likely have been able to attract a larger number of job applicants from which he could have selected employees whose enhanced marginal productivity might have earned Scrooge even greater profits. At such a point, terminating Cratchit’s employment would have been an economically rational act by Scrooge. As matters now stand, Scrooge’s employment policies have left him with the kind of groveling, ergophobic, humanoid sponge we have come to know as Bob Cratchit; a man we are expected to take into our hearts as an expression of some warped sense of the “Christmas spirit.” Being an astute businessmen, Ebeneezer Scrooge was well aware of the marketplace maxim that “you get what you pay for.”
Unaccustomed as Commissar Dickens is to the informal processes of the marketplace, we would not expect him to tell us anything about competitive alternatives for Cratchit’s services. Perhaps there are employers out there prepared to pay him a higher wage than he is receiving from my client. If this is so, then we must ask ourselves: did Bob Cratchit simply lack the ambition to seek higher-paying employment? It would appear so. At no time do we see this man exhibiting any interest in trying to better his and his family’s lot.
Fans of Scrooge the unreformed villain now dominate our politics and economics. Truly a repulsive state of affairs.
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