Free The Doubter's Companion by John Ralston Saul

deregulation.
    Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
    This is not what the early philosophers of capitalism had expected. The tempering of man by commerce as imagined by Adam Smith and David Hume has not happened. The once-popular view that democracy blossomed thanks to the rise of capitalism can now be seen in perspective. Their parallel rise isn’t one of cause and effect, as their ongoing difficult relationship continues to demonstrate.
    These misunderstandings aren’t surprising. Remarkable men writing in the eighteenth century were trying to guess what the new economic whirlwind would bring. We now have the advantage of experience.
    Even Max Weber in the early twentieth century was convinced that bureaucratic capitalism, along with public bureaucracy, would be forces for efficiency, speed and precision. We now know that he was wrong. The large corporations use their structures and their wealth to protect themselves from their own failures, but they are ineffectual when compared to smaller owner-managed companies.
    These visible experiences have been clouded for us by the self-serving public relations of the business schools, which continue to feed the structures, and the kidnapping of people like EDMUND BURKE and Adam Smith by the NEO-CONSERVATIVE ideologues. They present Smith as an apostle of unrestricted trade and unregulated markets. In fact his was a relatively moderate, balanced position which included public regulation to curb the excesses of capitalism.
    We can now see how some of the miscalculations were made. For example, many of those who imagined the new American Republic had the Venetian Republic in mind as a model. They saw VENICE’ s economic organization as a solution to their problems. They scarcely bothered with its underlying principles which excluded such elements as individualism, a responsible citizenry, free speech and democracy. It was an almost perfect CORPORATIST dictatorship.
    The great American philanthropist industrialists—such as Carnegie and Rockefeller—were in some ways naïve descendants of the Venetian tradition. They seemed to promise a society led by economic daring. Alongside their economic infrastructures, which became those of the nation, they left wonderful monuments to culture. But their sort of robber BARON leadership, no matter how creative, undermined the possibility of a citizen-based state.
    What these experiences indicate is that democracy and capitalism are not natural friends. That doesn’t mean they must be enemies. But if allowed free run of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which after all is not a natural state. Democracy was a gradual and difficult creation against the stated desires of the natural sectors of power (authoritarian, military, class). It requires constant participation and can only be maintained by the toughness of its citizenry.
    A functioning democracy nevertheless needs to create wealth. It therefore needs some balance of capitalism. By carefully defining the limits permitted to that phenomenon, responsible government can allow the process of wealth creation to succeed. This doesn’t mean that democracy can create ethical capitalism. That would be to impute values where none exist. Democracy can, however, lay out rules of procedure which are based in ethics. Capitalism is then surprised to discover that it can produce wealth within the rules of the democratic game, providing that they are perfectly clear and designed with the creation of wealth in mind. See: CORPORATISM and FREE.
    CARLYLE, THOMAS There is a certain pleasure to be had in picking out unpleasant individuals from the past and blaming them for whatever has since gone wrong. Unfortunately this is an inadvertent way of embracing the Heroic or Great Man view of HISTORY.
    As the nineteenth century advanced, so the battle