Apple pie, in its earliest iterations, probably wasn’t very good.
The delicious golden pastry crust, for example, wasn’t originally supposed to be eaten, instead merely to hold the apples in a central place. The apples themselves, unsweetened and unpreserved as they were, were probably mushy and sour, at best.
But the idea of apple pie survived, somehow.
And when some industrious apple-loving colonist first came ashore at Plymouth or Jamestown and found only bitter, hard crab apples in this new country, instead of giving up on pie altogether, he used his noggin.
Sugar, by that time, was more readily available, and with increasing colonization in the Caribbean, getting cheaper all the time. Why not make the tough crab apples more palatable with some sugar, and while you’re at it, add some to the pastry shell as well?
And boy, aren’t we all glad he did.
In this way, improving and later selling apple pie may have been the first uniquely American foray into capitalism.
The American cultural landscape is littered with such stories. Stories of men and women who took something, worked hard and invested time and money to make it better, created demand for it, and sold it. For some profit. And is that really so bad?
Recently, it has become fashionable to denounce profit-taking, to say capitalists are greedy and out of touch. The trend has been to declare capitalism dead, and to embrace a gradual slide into socialism, or a greater collectivism. In hard times, this is easy to do.
But even in hard times, it’s the wrong course. At the height of the Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was probably the closest this nation has come to a socialist leader, resisted the urge to nationalize banks, knowing they served us better by remaining solvent and independent.
In order to incent the nation’s vast industrial complex to gear up for war, he did not force it upon them, but rather, and rightly, led them to believe that doing so would make them a lot of money. And it did. To the victors, literally, went the spoils.
It’s not very different nowadays.
For all the bombast over the first $700 billion “bailout,” what that really was, and is, was an investment in the country’s banking infrastructure. The millions of dollars in capital infusion for banks big and small has not come lightly. The money has to, and will be, paid back in full, with interest. It was designed to be a program that will enable the government to make money from the deal in the long run, and help banks stay in business in the short term.
The latest rescue plan for the economy has Timothy Geithner calling for private investment in some public funds. The main incentive, he argues, is not that any private investor would be doing any great public good by “investing in America,” but rather, that doing so could make one a tidy profit, pure and simple.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but one often needs to spend money to make money, right?
To advocate a new socialism, or to argue our current government is somehow becoming socialist, is really missing the point.
First off, can anyone really effectively argue that Geithner, a former chieftain at of one of the biggest money-making institutions on the planet (literally, they actually print money at the Fed, you know), is anything but a capitalist?
But, more importantly, spending money, or more correctly, investing money with the intent of getting it all back, and then some, is not a socialist idea. It’s uniquely capitalist. And that capitalism is, truly, Americanism. It may look different than any kind of business plan we’ve yet seen from the feds, but at its core, it’s really about making money. Hopefully, lots of it. And that truly is good for all of us.
Making money has, literally, made America.
In other words, profits are as American, as, well, apple pie. And we all like apple pie, right?
