The problem of survival is never “solved,” once and for all, with no further thought or motion required. More precisely, the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival demands constant growth and creativeness….
Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as to best further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be active in the production process, whatever their level of ability. But it is not geared to the demands of stagnation. Neither is reality.
—Nathaniel Branden, “The Divine Right of Stagnation”
Our lives are improved in all sorts of ways by courageous, risk-bearing entrepreneurs, who seek to change the world at a profit. For that reason alone, we should jealously safeguard an environment friendly to entrepreneurship. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has shown through indefatigable research, when society is marred by envy of the richer and highly successful, we all suffer. Widespread prosperity soars, McCloskey demonstrates, when a culture in effect erects huge neon signs brightly flashing the message, “You think you have a great idea? Well, give it a go!”
That is not how people have felt through most of history. Envy that bred a fear of pioneers smothered innovation. Thomas Sowell has documented the horrors, including massacres, inflicted on “middleman minorities,” such as Jews in Europe, Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Indians and Lebanese in Africa. The economically illiterate masses could not understand why middlemen got rich “doing nothing,” never asking themselves why they nevertheless availed themselves of those allegedly unproductive services. That the relatively rich middlemen were usually different ethnically from the majority population made persecuting them with a clear conscience all the easier.
The point is that our lives, health, and comfort depend on innovators and entrepreneurs, and that they need freedom and security of life and property if they are to render their services. I don’t think people fully understand that, even today.
In 1952, the great actor Alec Guinness starred in an instructive and humorous movie called The Man in the White Suit. Set in post-World War II England, the story was written by Roger MacDougall, who collaborated on the screenplay with two other men. It’s worth watching. (It’s been streaming on Tubi.) It is relevant to what I just wrote.
This is the story of the panic that strikes the English textile industry when a visionary Cambridge-educated, mild-mannered, menial mill worker named Sidney Stratton (Guinness), working on his own time in the lab at Birnley’s Mill, develops a synthetic fiber that repels dirt and withstands all wear and tear. Think of it: clothing for all that would never need cleaning or replacing. Who could object? Boss Birnley’s daughter, Daphne, thinks it’s a wonderful idea. She tells Sidney, “Millions of people all over the world, living lives of drudgery, fighting an endless losing battle against shabbiness and dirt. You’ve won that battle for them. You’ve set them free. The whole world’s going to bless you.”
Well, not quite. Although Sidney’s boss initially plans to produce the new product, figuring it will give his business a competitive edge, he (apparently fearing a rival’s lawsuit) soon joins the other mill owners in the effort to suppress it. “Exploitation of anything new would upset the balance of trade,” one owner says.
It is not just the owners who abhor the innovation. The textile workers do too: they fear for their jobs. “Capital and labor are hand in hand in this,” an owner tells the workers. Even an old woman who takes in other people’s wash is angry: “Why can’t you scientists leave things alone?” she asks the naive and perplexed Sidney.
Together, the mill owners offer Sidney a huge fortune for the “world rights” to the fabric. But when they tell him they plan to suppress the innovation, he refuses to sign the contract. An offer to double the purchase price gets the owners nowhere. They then get a woman (Daphne) to seduce him into signing, but that doesn’t work. (She actually hoped Sidney would turn her down. She admires idealism and integrity.)
Now the owners turn to the only measure left to them. Not the intervention by the government, which has no role in the story. No, they resort to direct violence. They try to force him to sign, and when he tries to run away, they gang up on him. When he’s knocked unconscious by a falling plaque, they lock him in a room. The senior mill owner regrets that Sidney survived the blow to the head. With the help of Daphne, however, he escapes.
But Sidney is not out of the woods. When he encounters his fellow mill workers, who are just as unhappy about the invention as the owners, they also lock him up. Thanks to a little girl, however, he escapes again. All this time, he is wearing the prototype luminescent white suit.
Sidney reckons his only hope is to tell the newspapers the whole story. When he sets out on that mission, an angry mob of owners and workers chases and confronts him. They look as though they will kill him. The only thing that saves him is his suit—it shreds at the touch like tissue. Little did Sidney know that the fabric was unstable. When the mob sees this, the people laugh with joy, concluding that the fabric is no threat to them at all.
With the danger dispelled, Sidney, whom Birnley has fired, is now free to go. As he leaves, his assistant hands him his lab notebook, and Birnley narrates:
“The crisis is over now. The news of Sidney’s failure brought relief to the world. It has been a hard and bitter experience for all of us. But we faced the future with confidence. We have seen the last of Sidney Stratton.”
As the dispirited Sidney glances at his notebook, he smiles when he understands how to fix the instability. “I see!” he proclaims. He walks on in a jaunty, determined gait. At which point, narrator Birnley adds apprehensively, “At least, I hope we’ve seen the last of him.” The end.
What are we to make of this story? If you look carefully, you see that it is not, as you might have expected from filmmakers, an indictment of capitalism or an endorsement of socialism. It shows complacent businessmen and workers in a negative light: both are willing to use force directly against an innovator to protect their positions.
The position of the workers is particularly interesting. A coworker warns Sidney that, despite what he’s been told, their boss will never bring the new product to market. The worker accuses businessmen of suppressing lots of great products, such as “the razor blade that never gets blunt and the car that runs on water with a pinch of something in it.” But this worker also opposes the production of the new fabric. Apparently, if a life-enhancing innovation doesn’t threaten his job, he’s all for it, but if it does threaten his job, then it must be suppressed! So much for worker solidarity. The owners are damned if they suppress an innovation and damned if they don’t. (How welcoming to Sidney’s job-threatening idea would a democratic worker-owned textile mill be?)
In Sidney Stratton, we behold a visionary individualist opposed by people who fear change. Sidney’s antagonists are too myopic to realize that while innovation indeed disrupts in the short run (think of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”), when an innovative product economically satisfies people, that is progress. Even those who disrupted gain access to improved products and new opportunities, if the market is substantially free. The workers in the movie mostly overlook that:
- They are consumers who frequently wear clothes, and
- Since people’s desire for better lives knows no limit, the potential for productive opportunities will always exist. (That is, if entrepreneurial alertness is left unfettered.)
Think of the alternative to progress: stagnation. If the anti-innovation attitude had prevailed consistently throughout history, we’d still be living in caves, or the few people who could survive would be. Today, because of visionary entrepreneurs, relative freedom, and global trade, most of the world’s eight billion people live better and longer than people have ever lived before. Those still lagging lack capitalist institutions. Ironically, the complaint about capitalism these days is that it produces too much and too many new things, not that it suppresses new products. (See Howard Roark’s trial speech in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Nathanel Branden’s “The Divine Right of Stagnation” in Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness.)
We are only left to ask what would have happened had Sidney sold his formula to the mill owners. Well, obviously, no one else would have known about it or lamented the missed opportunity for clean clothing that lasts forever. If word had leaked, would anyone have proposed that the keepers of the secret be tortured until they divulged it? I don’t think so.
We need not lose sleep about such things. The claim that businesses suppress useful technologies has been widely made but never demonstrated. As Ludwig von Mises told us in 1949: “It is absurd to speak of an alleged bias of modern big business against technological improvement. The great corporations spend huge sums in the search for new processes and new devices…. Those alleging suppression of useful innovations do not cite a single instance of such an innovation’s being unused in the countries protecting it by a patent while it is used by the Soviets—no respecters of patent privileges.” (H/T Robert P. Murphy)
Speaking of patents, a formidable body of scholarship challenges the very proposition that ideas and their implementation ought to be treated legally like physical property. (See my “Patent Nonsense.”). In fact, laws purporting to protect “intellectual property” entail the violation of actual property rights. That means that while one is free not divulge one’s thoughts, someone else who comes by them nonaggressively should be free to make and sell products based on them, unmolested by the state. As usual, competition, the universal solvent, is the best protection.
The Man in the White Suit is a timeless and romantic tale of rational individualism, creativity, and the persistent pursuit of values—and those who resent people who live those virtues. The most revealing line is the narrator’s: “The news of Sidney’s failure brought relief to the world.” Really? Ayn Rand could have written this story.
In the Trump-Mamdani era—consisting of narcissistic social-engineering and frigid collectivism—we ought to be especially sensitive to the perils that beset innovation.
