University of Maryland’s Benjamin Barber is not a typical political scientist. Few of his colleagues ever write anything read by more than fellow academics. Still fewer earn enough recognition to win an invitation to shows like Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” Barber achieved both.

Barber’s notoriety stems from his 1995 book, “Jihad vs McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World.” In it Barber argues the interests of multi-national corporations, on one hand, and traditional, religious and nationalistic societies, on the other, will challenge the growth and health of liberal democracy.

“Jihad vs McWorld” joined Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992) and Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking the World Order” (1993) as widely read academic attempts to make sense of the post-Cold War era.

Having studied all three theses in college during the height of their buzz, I thought then, as I do now, that Huntington was right, Fukuyama was rubbish, and Barber somewhere else.

This story continues below
Advertisement

Barber is making the rounds, including Colbert, to promote his latest book, “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole.”

If you get past the hyperbolic title and the $26.95 price tag, you’ll find Barber more concerned about McWorld than about Jihad these days. The fact that two-thirds of the world can’t benefit from the consumer capitalism practiced by the richest third rightly concerns him. They need food, water, shelter and medicine, while we try to sell them iPods, Coke and Big Macs, Barber says.

Adam Smith supplied answers for Barber’s concerns more than 200 years ago in “The Wealth of Nations.” And thanks to P.J. O’Rourke’s latest book, “On The Wealth of Nations,” we have a brief, funny and insightful alternative to plodding through several hundred pages of 18th century prose.

“Even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith’s ideas,” writes O’Rourke. “Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: Pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade.”

The point of economic progress is also, for Smith, quite simple: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.” And it is especially important to realize that what should be consumed is also an individual prerogative.

If it were put to a vote, people would choose to spend to buy mosquito nets for a poor village rather than to buy a Louis Vuitton purse for Paris Hilton. Most day-to-day economic decisions are not that clear cut, but in a free economy such divergent needs can both be met. But only if decision-making is left to individuals who, after all, know their situation better than any bureaucrat.

Barber understands that markets are essential, but still asks “whether markets can be made to meet the real needs capitalism is designed to serve, whether capitalism can adapt to the sovereignty of democratic authority that alone will allow it to survive.”

But Barber doesn’t seem to realize that no government of any kind is able cause the free market to behave in a certain way. The free market is simply what we call it when individual adults and companies are free to pursue their own interests.

Smith knew the only thing government can do for the market is to maintain the framework for a free economy: Strong, honest political institutions that treat everyone equally under just laws.

The world’s poorest two-thirds could make their economies grow and their lives better if they had that kind of government instead of leaders who use the economy to grow the government.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.