Happy birthday Wilhelm Roepke!

Reader Marty reminds us that today is the birthday of Wilhelm Roepke, the Swiss German economist and thinker. In this review essay of John Zmirak's excellent and very readable biography of Roepke, John Attarian speaks to why crunchy-cons and fellow travelers should pay heed to this Catholic localist. Excerpt:

Zmirak presents Ropke's economics in language as accessible as Ropke's own. Ropke began with the idea of the dignity of the human person--a being who is not an isolated individual but part of a family and community, whose well-being is dependent on theirs. His thought owed much to the Austrian free-market school; like Mises and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), he grasped the modern market economy's incredible capacity to synchronize the activities of multitudes of persons and its need for reason, peace, and freedom if it is to operate effectively. Like them, he endorsed free trade and the gold standard.

But unlike the laissez-faire Austrians, Ropke conceded that capitalism can be disruptive and inhumane, and that its vaunted efficiency and affluence can exact social and spiritual forfeits. In consequence, he envisioned a more positive and extensive role for the state, as rule-maker, enforcer of competition, and provider of temporary relief from the hardships and dislocations inflicted by a dynamic, competitive economy. He saw competition and a freely-operating price system as the "core" of a free economy; provided state interventions did not disrupt these, Ropke deemed them "compatible" with capitalism. Such interventions included antitrust measures, progressive estate taxes, modest loans for small business and farmers, and temporary transfer payments to displaced workers. In time, however, Ropke became a scathing critic of the welfare state on both economic and ethical grounds.

Rejecting corporate capitalism with its tendency to a concentration of ownership, Ropke endorsed a "humane-scale" economy of ownership of productive property widely distributed among multitudes of small family farms and businesses. He opposed private monopolies, Zmirak observes, because only economic decentralization could "guarantee a continuation of economic liberty." Ropke called his version of capitalism the "Third Way," or "social market economy," because it combined free markets with a concern for the common good. Aware that socialism's appeal was its seeming moral superiority over capitalism, he also admitted that capitalism has its faults, such as the corrosive effect of competition on human solidarity.

By the end of World War II, Ropke was a Christian humanist. A classical liberalism drawing upon the rationalist Englightenment, he now understood, was too fragile to withstand fascism and socialism. Instead, Ropke increasingly emphasized, it must start from Christianity's respect for the person, the love of reason, and the Teutonic tradition of decentralization.