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.Anyone who is willing toorder his soldiers to shoot at his own people will manage to keephis people together for some time.Labor and capital differ in another important way.Capital andthe capitalist form a unit.One cannot exist without the other.It THE WAR FOR WEALTH 129is as if they were joined at the hip.Countries that have usednationalization as a means of separating capital from its privateowners have deeply regretted it and learned the most importantprinciple of economics first hand: if capital is separated from cap-italists, it soon starts to disintegrate.The capitalist has no purposewithout capital, nor does capital make much sense without thecapitalist.It becomes eroded, melts away, and ultimately evapo-rates like a drop of water on a hot griddle.François Mitterand had hardly been voted into office asFrance s first socialist president when he began to make good ona daring campaign promise.He had told voters that he plannedto make a break with capitalism which was precisely whattranspired.In the early 1980s, the French government national-ized the country s major banks and 13 of its leading industrial cor-porations.But the change did not sit well with the companies.Profits shrank, and the public became alarmed when the firstreports of losses began rolling in.In a cabinet meeting an agitatedminister of finance Jacques Delors told Mitterand: All you talkabout is lending money.If we end up in International MonetaryFund receivership, you will lay the blame at my feet. Sure enough, the new state-owned companies soon began los-ing money, prompting international investors to withdraw theirinvestments from France.The franc became subject to speculativeattacks on the financial markets.The government, whose solvencywas already being called into question, managed to obtain an emer-gency loan from Saudi Arabia to fend off speculators.How humil-iating for the Grande Nation! The magic of Mitterand s socialistexperiment had quickly gone up in smoke.Mitterand himself ini-tiated measures to bring the country back on course, beginningwith the reprivatization of state-owned enterprises. The statemust be capable of restraint, said the newly enlightened president.The experiment and would-be debacle ultimately had a happyend because capital and the capitalist were reunited.Eastern Europe s planned economies, unwilling to take thisstep, were headed for a slow demise.Companies remained stateowned until they were little more than shells.Karl Marx and 130 GABOR STEINGARTFriedrich Engels make no mention of the essence of capital: thatcapital and the capitalist are as inseparable as a tree and its bark.Jobs and workers were at a disadvantage from the start becausethey did not enjoy the same symbiotic relationship.The move-ments of workers back and forth across national boundaries can beinterrupted.But border guards are incapable of preserving theircountry s jobs.The fact that the countries of the West managed tokeep their labor markets by and large closed to outsiders seems tobe the true miracle of the postwar years.The nations of the worldtraded all sorts of goods, exporting and importing bananas and tel-evision sets, gasoline and steel plates, and money also traveledfreely across borders.But there was still no exporting or import-ing of workers and jobs.The word offshoring had not been coined.There is a simple explanation for the prolonged, peaceful coex-istence of workers and jobs: the labor markets in Europe andAmerica were not significantly different.Businesses on the twosides of the Atlantic were competitors, not rivals.They paid wagesbut not charity.Children were allowed to remain children, notforced to serve as cheap labor.The Western world was a gener-ally uniform world.Everyone had the same values freedom,democracy, gender and racial equality, private ownership, unfet-tered trade unions, and much more and everyone played by thesame rules.The experts spoke of a level playing field. We call ita flat world. Eastern Europe s communist leaders had no place on the West splaying field.They exchanged goods and raw materials with theWest, but they stayed away from its labor and capital markets.They created their own playing field, the complex and ineffectivecontract system common to all planned economies.The thirdworld also lived on a different planet
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