The message of Christmas – as Dickens and the Muppets knew – is that sharing wealth, rather than hording it brings both prosperity and joy to the world, writes James Price
As we approach Christmas, capitalism is wont to come in for some criticism. Several classic Christmas movies, like Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, contrast crass consumerism with the ‘true meaning’ of the season. They take their lead, of course, from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and one of the great capitalists of all ages, Ebeneezer Scrooge.
This work is best re-told, of course, in the greatest Christmas film of all time: The Muppets Christmas Carol. Its brilliance largely stems from Michael Caine, who said of his performance: “I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role”.
As a result, he is the definitive Scrooge, embodying, at the beginning at least, the sort of villainous capitalist that haunts every leftie’s imagination, with infamous lines like “Christmas is a very busy time for us, Mr Cratchit. People spending the mortgage money on frivolities… Harvest time for the moneylenders.” Things are so bad, one little mouse even laments that there are “no crusts of bread for those in need; no cheeses for us meeces”.
But through the story, we see where and how things went wrong in Scrooge’s ideology. “He loves money because he thinks it gives him power” sings an early chorus. He preferred to hoard money and chase gold for its own sake, like notorious mercantilists Smaug the Dragon, or his namesake Scrooge McDuck, both of whom are often depicted swimming in lakes of gold coins, diamond crowns, and other treasures. In the process, Caine’s Scrooge turns bitter and miserly, and drives away his beloved as well as his humanity.
But today, we implicitly understand the great lesson from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, that hoarding coins is useless, both to the hoarder and all those around him. Smith’s key insight was that true prosperity comes from efficiently using resources to build prosperity through production, hard work, increased efficiency and trade.
And just as Smith has an invisible hand operating to help people generate growth, so too is Scrooge visited by spirits of his own. Not just the ghosts of Christmas, Past, Present, and Future, but his old business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley warns him: “It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men.”
Over the course of both the original novella, and the Muppets homage, Scrooge learns Smith’s insight into the true function of the capitalist, wealth generating economic system. Elated by this revelation, he shares a Christmas turkey with his nephew, Fred, gives presents to his staff (of abundant energy; take note, Ed Miliband) and donations to charity.
Scrooge creates a surplus
By creating a surplus, he is able to give to his community, his family and his colleagues. No longer “captive, bound, by the double-ironed shackles” of Marley’s bankrupt mercantilist ideology, Scrooge is now happy, wealthy and able and willing to serve. He is overcome when he even receives a lovely red scarf as a gift in return from Beaker.
It is this economic system, of consensual exchange, that similarly allows us all to enjoy a wonderful Christmas. Receiving gifts is always a joy, but seeing the faces of those you love as you give them something special is the true wealth. Both this exchange AND wealth generation are necessary. As Margaret Thatcher once said, it wasn’t enough for the Samaritan to have good intentions alone, he also needed money.
And free markets allow people today to do this on a scale never before imagined. A hard-working single mum can provide gifts for her children that Kings of previous centuries could scarcely have dreamed of.
A wonderful tweet this week shows how miraculous this process is: “I see the world in price per lb. A Tesla Model 3 costs less than Camembert. We pull sand, oil, and ore from the earth and transmute them into machines cheaper than aged milk.”
Thanks to capitalism, and now-enlightened Scrooge’s everywhere, we can have both those amazing machines, and there will even be enough cheeses for the meeces.