Tragedy of the Commonwealth and the Vision of Wendell Berry, The

1. Corporations

The commonwealth, with its agrarian economy, faith, knowledge, and affection for place, has been undermined by a "sentimental capitalism"131 that sacrifices "everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful" to serve the interests of "the great corporations."132 In Berry's estimation, it is to the corporations that we "are rapidly giving proxies ... to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly ... that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities."133 In so doing, argues Berry, we sanction an oligarchic form of economy134 that uses "a symbolic economy of money" to create the appearance of "unprecedented 'prosperity' and 'economic growth'" in the midst of "degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing families, and perishing communities."135 Those farms, forests, ecosystems, and communities comprise the "real economy" that Berry would have us foster and grow. The foolishness of this substitution, he writes, is rooted in "the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as 'a person.'"136 The legal fiction of the "corporate person" results in a "limitless destructiveness ... precisely because a corporation is not a person."137 Explaining his opposition to the "corporate person," Berry writes:

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetimes of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.138

Softening his rhetoric, if but a little, Berry cautions that he does not mean to suggest "that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people," only that "all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy,"139 namely the "global 'free market' economy" that Berry considers an "inherent[] ... enemy to the natural world ... ."140

2. Free Markets

Berry considers the economic practice of delegating the means of subsistence to large corporations and forfeiting self-sufficiency to be a kind of "moral and economic absurdity [that] exists for the sake of the allegedly 'free' market... ."141 He reduces the philosophical framework of the free market to a solitary principle: "commodities will be produced wherever they can be produced at the lowest cost, and consumed wherever they will bring the highest price."142 Thus, he warns, free market capitalism seeks only "to make too cheap and sell too high."143

Painting the allegedly free market with a broad brush, Berry rejects the notion that "[t]he 'right' of a corporation to exercise its economic power without restraint... [is] a form of freedom, a political liberty implied presumably by the right of individual citizens to own and use property."144 Rather, he argues, "the 'free market' idea introduces into government a sanction of an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely that the 'free market' is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money."145 As such, the free market exploits the small farmer, the laborer, and the land. According to Berry, making "too cheap" and selling "too high" has two requirements: