A Dickens Of A Debate Between Mr. Scrooge And Mr. Say

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You and I got clubbed by Ebenezer Scrooge over Christmas. I don't mean that he hit us with a club. Scrooge was not the wielder; he was the club itself. The wielder was an angry left-wing radio talk show host named Mark Levine. The scene of the assault was The Kudlow Report on CNBC. Levine wants higher taxes on investors because money left in our hands is wasted, because like Ebenezer Scrooge we waste it on gold ingots rather than spend it on health care for Tiny Tim.

Dickens' Christmas Carol actually gets used this way quite often by anti-business demagogues. Pop culture doesn't help much: Screen adaptations always misquote the actual text of the story, distorting the true message while promoting an anti-capitalist one.


Malthus famously argued that in a world in which economies grew arithmetically and population grew geometrically, mass want would be inevitable. His Essay on Population created a school of thought which continues to this day under the banners of Zero Population Growth and Sustainability. The threat of a "population bomb" under which my generation lived was Paul Ehrlich's modern rehashing of the Malthusian argument about the inability of productivity to keep pace with, let alone exceed, population growth.



"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation? … If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."


"What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.



The Ghost of Christmas Present is the key to understanding Dickens' political and economic philosophy. He is the symbol of abundance. He literally and figuratively holds a cornucopia, a horn of plenty. While he wears a scabbard at his side, it is bereft of sword and neglected in care. Peace and plenty.

When Scrooge asks him how many brothers he has, the ghost replies "More than 1,800." When Scrooge declares that this is a 'tremendous family to provide for," the ghost rises in anger. And then he takes Scrooge where? To the university economics department? To the socialist meeting house? No, he takes Scrooge to the market, and shows him the abundance there, especially the fruits (sometimes literal) of foreign trade:

"There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Friars… There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, … there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, … there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner."

Onions from Spain, grapes from the Mediterranean and citrus from the equatorial regions. How else could one eat oranges in England in winter? At the end of their Christmas feast, the poor Cratchits eat, yes, oranges. How else, other than through international trade, could the poor afford oranges? Surely, Christmas Present, and his creator Mr. Dickens, and his teacher Mr. Say, are true disciples of Mr. Smith.

Scrooge is in need of all of this "reclamation" (to quote the Ghost of Christmas Past) partly because he grew up in an atmosphere of want. Dickens makes a point of describing not just the emotional deprivation of Scrooge's early life (made clear in all of the movies) but also the material deprivation of the boarding school in which he spent his formative years (not portrayed in film versions). "There was an earthy savor in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candlelight, and not too much to eat." Note that hunger specifically is mentioned.

Already an old man, when the story was set in the first half of the 18th century, Scrooge would have grown up before the triumph of the Smithian ideas and the repeal of the hunger-inducing, protectionist "corn laws." The psychology of the story is mixed with the economics and history of it.

Scrooge was a man whose present was distorted by his past. The old order, of monopoly and protection and tariff and hunger, gave him a nearly indelible sense of the inherent scarcity of the world. The only thing which rendered Malthus' ideas plausible to so many people was the shortage associated with command economies. Scrooge, the boy, because a victim of that, believed that want was an ontological necessity, rather than a tragic by-product of state planning.

Ironically, this made Scrooge a much less wealthy man than he could have been. He was a miser, not an entrepreneur, because his economic philosophy was a miserly one, not an entrepreneurial one. Look at Scrooge's mentor Fezziwig, who had two apprentices and dozens of employees.

By contrast Scrooge, even as an old man, had no apprentices and only one employee, a low wage and low skilled one at that. Where was Scooge's ambition? What was his plan for expansion?

Michael Dell is reported to have started his dream with an image of a large building filled with employees with a flag pole outside. But Scrooge didn't even update his Scrooge and Marley sign upon the death of his partner seven years after the event, preferring to let rust simply erase the latter's name. What entrepreneur thinks that way? Scrooge and Marley is basically a collection agency micro-business, whose proprietor did not even make the Forbes 15 List of Wealthiest Fictional Characters.

When Scrooge's nephew Fred presses his uncle to reveal the cause of their alienation, Scrooge exclaims "Why did you marry?" This is not a change of subject; it is another bitter fruit of the old man's anti-natal philosophy. Small wonder then, that after Scrooge's conversion he spends Christmas day with his nephew's family and cheerfully watches Topper court Fred's wife's "plump sister."

If Scrooge has modern counterparts, they're more likely to be found among those sad, self-sterilizing minimizers of carbon footprints than in the circles of supply-side entrepreneurs. Who, after all, could claim to a smaller carbon footprint than the man who tried to heat his office with a single piece of coal?

The debate between Say and Malthus, between Scrooge and the Ghosts, continues to this day. Is the market economy a source of abundance or shortage? Is each new little boy or a girl mostly mouth, or mostly mind? Is it a Say/Kudlow/Forbes/Wanniski/Gilder world, or is it a Keynes/Ehrlich/Krugman/Gore world? We know what Dickens would answer, how about you?

Jerry Bowyer is a CNBC contributor and author of the upcoming Free Market Capitalist's Survival Guide.
