The other day Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), stood up at a podium in Delhi and declared himself a "moral warrior" of capitalism, raring to carry out god's moral commandment to lift people out of poverty with an economic cocktail of what he called "abundance without attachment". This was in the auditorium of the World Wildlife Fund. How sweet is that?
Mr Brooks said that he'd met a monk who explained that people are dissatisfied despite growing prosperity because of their attachment to money. If you ditch the attachment, said Mr Brooks, then you can be happy-and preferably rich. If this were coming from just another middle-aged man reorienting his priorities after a personal epiphany, it would be boring. Coming from the president of the AEI, it sounds a little disingenuous.
The AEI has been accused of trying to bribe journalists to diss the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. It has claimed that non-governmental organisations can "undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies". As a proponent of big business, and as a recipient of a lot of big business funding, it helped craft the Bush administration's Iraq policy. It is the burning heart of neo-conservatism.
And yet, the AEI has warm relations with the Dalai Lama, a self-professed Marxist - and it was the Dalai Lama who reached out to the AEI.
I know nothing about economics and am open to the conventional view that when it comes to fighting poverty, capitalism really is the best of a bunch of bad options. But you'd have to be a much truer believer than me to put your scepticism aside.
According to Mr Brooks, people all over the world fail to understand that capitalism is not about some people grabbing ever more out of a limited pie, but an endlessly self-generating system of having more and more for everyone so that evermore poor people are lifted out of poverty. It is in disseminating this truth, he said, that the proponents of capitalism have failed. How, then, he wondered, do we sell the god-mandated moral imperative that is capitalism in India?
If that seems like a lot of loaves-and-fish stuff it is because, for Mr Brooks and for much of conservative America, capitalism really is an article of faith. "Faith comes first," said Mr Brooks. "The markets must reinforce that morality." Given how much the right sneers at the left's perceived "moralism", it was refreshing to watch a torchbearer of the right get on a panel titled "Capitalism and compassion: Why morality matters in a market economy" and struggle to figure out, if not why capitalism does not equal social justice, at least why rich people are not happier.
Mr Brooks flung "greed is good" to the ground, spat on it and ground it into the dust with his boot, calling it "one of the seven deadly sins". He and his co-panelist, Gurcharan Das, were sad about the fact that so many people in the world think of capitalism as a dirty word.
Perhaps you have to acknowledge - to more directly feel, as so many people in India do - that capitalism operates within a policy framework that is easily manipulated by the rich primarily to benefit the rich, because people, especially powerful people, are much less hung up on morals than is strictly desirable. You have to acknowledge that land rights are legislated out of the fingers of traditional communities and landholders, that environmental concerns are thrown out the window, that peaceful protests - against displacement (to make way for mining), risk (living near a nuclear plant), or health problems (because of environmental pollution) - are swiftly beaten down to get projects up and moving.
The United States has institutionalised this manipulation in the art of lobbying, which at least has the virtue of being more transparent, though that only means that you get to watch less "moral" capitalists at work. AEI-style capitalism has traditionally been sweet on access to markets, not on uplifting the poor. If access to markets uplifts the poor, well, super. It's hard to believe that Mr Brooks' attempt to flog capitalism in India with a palatable spiritual imperative is not just another marketing tactic for the good old morals-free stuff.
And yet, there's something about the man that makes you wonder whether he might not be serious; whether he might not sincerely be trying to recast capitalism in a kinder, gentler mould. Is it just a cynical public relations stunt? Is Mr Brooks leading a capitalist group therapy session, or is he just some lonesome quixotic character tilting at moral windmills while the rest of his economic brethren snigger at him? Is American capitalism really ready for reform? And is that person who's going "ROFL" the loudest, in fact, the Indian capitalist?
It will be interesting to watch.
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