The Wire’s Critique of Capitalism

The Wire was surely the greatest television show to ever be aired. Radley Balko, amongst others, has loved the show. But today, he delves into its alleged critique of capitalism, linking to Connor Friedersdorf’s work as well.

1. Both agree that capitalism isn’t Baltimore’s problem. Rather, the bureaucracy is. There is no doubt that, at almost every turn, the bureaucracy is shown to be an inhibitor in people’s lives, in no way benefitting everybody and seeming to undercut people.

2. That said, there are moments when in fact the bureaucracy does seem to help people - perhaps the motivations are wrong, but there are plenty of times in the show when bureaucratic actors do clean the streets, arrest the bad guys, provide for the kids, and generally exist in a manner beneficial to the citizenry.

3. To ignore the fact that Marlo, Avon, Proposition Joe Stewart and The Greek are capitalists, however, is to ignore reality. All are offering a product, wanted by thousands. All are working strictly for profit, caring little for what happens to their customers. All maintain their positions through power, violence, and the ability to create monopolies. Friedersdorf, at first, hilariously claims that this doesn’t represent true capitalism, because true capitalism is free from all of these things.

Later, he acknowledges that the idea of perfect capitalism exists only in books, and requires its participants to operate free from greed. Does anybody really believe WalMart wouldn’t completely shutter its competition if it could? Or if Microsoft could have forced itself onto everybody, it wouldn’t have? People pursuing money will often go to outrageous lengths to make it, steal it, have it, or earn it. If that means playing outside of the rules, so be it.

Turning around and claiming that what we see there isn’t real capitalism is changing the rules after the game.

4. Finally, there’s this from Balko:

And that is how two brilliant men like Ed Burns and David Simon … call themselves men of the left, which implies a kind of default support for massive government intervention to solve or alleviate suffering, poverty, crime, and other social ills.

If The Wire attempted to communicate anything, it was that our monolithic understanding of things is wrong. Criminals can be good (Cutty). Addicts can be friendly (Bubbles). Police can be assholes (Dozerman). Politicians can be awful (Clay Davis) or slightly less awful (Tommy Carcetti). Gunmen can have hearts of gold (Omar) and love their children (Chris Partlow) or just be out and out killers (Snoop).

Being a liberal doesn’t mean that you necessarily want the government involved in everything. In fact, as somebody who has flirted enough with libertarianism to know that I’d rather call myself a liberal, I can be pro-market, pro-freedom, and still believe that government agencies should be responsible for fixing the roads. I would imagine that the authors of The Wire deeply believe that the government can help to fix some of these problems, if they’d just do things differently. Take, for instance, Season 3’s “Hamsterdam.” The government backs off, its various agents step in, offering condoms, clean needles, information about treatment, and education, a situation which appears to be working. (Would it in real life? Perhaps. Libertarians against the drug war seem to believe so…but some of those people doing good work in Hamsterdam were government functionaries of various sorts.)

Meanwhile, I would also offer that The Wire’s authors might believe that some solution is necessary for suffering, poverty, crime, and other social ills, issues which libertarians rarely spend any time on, choosing to instead claim that, “the market will solve everything!”

No solution is perfect. No solution is right. The Wire was a searing indictment of everybody’s politics. To claim it as a bastion of libertarian thought is ignoring the message as much as claiming it as a bastion of anybody else’s thought.

Update: This is the sort of capitalist behavior that I’m talking about. Greedy people do awful things, as evidenced by this sort of behavior, all completely legal in Balko’s libertarian dreamscape.)