What Capitalism Doesn't Make Better

The Mechanical Arts

I’ve lived in the same place for almost five years, and one storefront that comes to mind has gone from empty real estate to a Columbian restaurant, to a Boba tea shop, to, at present, a breakfast diner. I could say the same for a couple of other storefronts, and I imagine it’s a similar story for most parts of the country. Trying to open a restaurant—or a shop of any other mechanical art, for that matter—means you are immediately in an arena of cutthroat competition. Mechanical arts, as Dr. Christopher Schlect defines it, are “arts that are ordered to the production of useful objects. Thus the art of baking produces bread, the art of carpentry produces shelters and furniture, [and] the art of cobbling produces shoes.” Small businesses of the mechanical arts have a particularly hard time getting off the ground. Capitalism has advanced production so far for these types of goods that, if you want to do something like own your own woodworking business, the dream is difficult to attain unless you aspire to endlessly grow and scale. This type of aspiration is what our system rewards: the American dream offers wealth and social status to the most productive in our society, but—and people might disagree with me here—some folks just want to bake bread. However, the current system doesn’t produce well-priced local goods for consumers, and people who want to break into a business like breadmaking need to find a specialized and marketable niche. Unless a person lives in a big city, having a shop that only makes bread just isn’t plausible, and the absence of small business proprietors offering useful goods deadens American culture. The problem is, the mechanical arts are almost completely unviable to break into at a ground level, and they exist better there. In other words, the mechanical arts exist better locally.

In modern America, the things being produced in the mechanical arts are very similar across the country. The amazing feat of logistics that is next-day delivery has made a monoculture of goods across the nation. We often no longer have an attachment to the person or geographical place that made those goods. The people who desire to homestead, for example, and make videos online about homesteading, have a similar-looking henhouse, barn, kitchen counter, etc. whether they live in Montana or Alabama. One could cut and paste the aesthetic across the entire country. On the other hand, the cultural differences between North and South Germany are stark, even though it’s a land mass roughly the size of Montana. Author Rebekah Merkle has a similar point in a talk titled “Creating a Sense of Place.”

“Modern American culture is an awful lot of things: it is wealthy, it is opulent, it is convenient, it is efficient, and it is honestly, pretty soulless. If I plunked you down blindfolded in an unknown location and then took the blindfold off, you're [probably] standing in a parking lot and you're looking at the shopping center around you. There's Marshalls, there's Famous Footwear, there's a Nike outlet, there's Ulta, there's Starbucks, there's a Red Robin, there's AT&T and there's a TJ Maxx. Now, tell me where you are, and what city you are in. It's literally any city in America and it's impossible to tell the difference.”

Since success in capitalism means to scale and grow, then the businesses that can do this the most successfully are found across the entire nation, making most of the goods sold in America effectively the same. The small-town bakeries and bookshops are few and far between. However, the unique shopping experiences of a particular place are what travelers want and local citizens are proud of. They’re what make a place rich and special. But, wherever a person drives in the USA, they’re most likely going to pull over and eat somewhere they’ve eaten a thousand times already. With a short stop anywhere, a person would be hard-pressed to find anything special or novel about an American town, except, maybe, its diner.

The difficulty isn’t a lack of desire in people to open and run these kinds of stores, but how hard it is to make them successful. Recently, I had a conversation with the man who’s been running my favorite coffee shop for the past 10 years. Jim said,

“I only recently started to be able to pay myself a decent wage. For most of those years, I was making minimum wage or less.”

I don’t put the blame 100% on capitalism. I don’t claim that this particular coffee shop owner’s experience is the same across the state I live in or the entire country. However, I can’t see Jim’s experience as a good thing. It’s not good for those who choose to take the difficult road of owning a small business, and it’s not good for the creation of rich, meaningful, and diverse American cultures. I’m not saying starting a business in the mechanical arts shouldn’t be hard, or a sacrifice, but should it be that hard? Furthermore, small businesses are most often forced to scale or fail, and that isn’t what many people desire. Some people—the character played by Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, comes to mind—just want to keep their store open and make ends meet, and that is the end of their ambition. Shouldn’t that be feasible?

One thing capitalism is excellent at is finding the perfect intersection between the quality of a product and the price a person is willing to pay for it. For example, I recently bought a woodworking hobbyist a set of four wood chisels. In the not-so-distant past, I might have been lucky to find them at a local shop or hardware store, and then had to pay whatever price they were listed for. There wouldn’t have been another option if they were too high quality or expensive. Today, I could choose the set of wood chisels that were at the perfect intersection of quality and price I wanted because Amazon gave me so many options to choose from.

This blessing doesn’t always provide the best results for the real humans who use these products. For people incentivized by cash to find the perfect intersection of quality and price for any given product, there is a big incentive to economize. Often, they economize in hidden ways that aren’t good for the people who consume their product. Nowhere is this more obvious than food. For example, Potassium Bromate, a food additive used to strengthen dough and improve elasticity, is banned in the EU, China, and India, but not in the United States, and it’s linked to cancer, nervous system damage, and kidney damage. Companies who cut every imaginable cost (while still towing the line of the law) are more successful than companies who don’t. Strange enough, the market rewards the companies most likely to harm people. It’s hard to imagine the same thing happening to a person who gets their bread from Susan’s bakery two blocks away. Susan’s bakery, perhaps, is a labor of love, which means she doesn’t only avoid ingredients like Potassium Bromate but gets her flour from the artisanal mill an hour away--not from Monsanto.

How do we incentivize business owners to care most for the health and well-being of their fellow citizens? How do we have a system that rewards those who are the best at what they do, so they can practice their craft for the best of all? This is a cracking problem, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. To throw out “Capitalism” lock, stock, and barrel would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. However, I do think one key may be to, through law, reward local makers who want to make a living in the mechanical arts. If your neighbor William Hucksworthy Jr., your dad’s best friend in high school, carved the wooden red toy truck your toddler loves to play with, he’s at least a little less likely to put something like lead in the paint. It’s more unique and meaningful too. And, across the state line, someone might be making similar toy trucks out of lumber local to their area. They’re different, but no less beautiful. If craftsmen with excellent skills in the mechanical arts can be concentrated locally, then we gain two things: better lives for small-business owners and a richer American culture.