Ebenezer Scrooge visiting Tiny Tim in a scene from the 1938 motion picture A Christmas Carol.
One Christmas, when I was 12 years old, my Aunt Esther gave me a collection of Christmas stories by Charles Dickens. Like any book, your impressions can change depending on when you read it. That may be particularly true of A Christmas Carol.
One way to interpret A Christmas Carol is as an indictment of economic injustice and the power an employer holds over an employee. In the story, the employer is the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and the employee is his nephew, the clerk Bob Cratchit. Scrooge begrudges permitting his employees even to take off Christmas Day and appears to pay Cratchit as little as possible.
Read more completely, A Christmas Carol may have little to do with an indictment of capitalism or the dynamic between employers and employees. “The most obvious approach is to read the book as a straightforward critique of the inequities of Victorian capitalism, particularly given that Karl Marx cited Dickens as an influence on his revolutionary thinking,” writes The Economist. “As A Christmas Carol was published, Friedrich Engels was in Manchester writing The Condition of the Working Class in England, which recorded that plight in equally vivid detail.”
“Yet if Dickens and Engels identified similar problems, they had very different ideas as to the solution,” notes The Economist. “The Cratchit family do not rise up in violent revolution: their woes are alleviated by a sudden spasm of charity on Scrooge’s personal behalf. . . . The book does suggest more lasting improvements to socioeconomic troubles. It is just that, far from being anti-capitalist, they involve a confident, cheerful sort of consumerism.”
The Economist even finds an argument for free trade in the story: “One of the most richly described scenes is the Christmas market, which overflows with abundance: Spanish onions, bunches of Mediterranean grapes, and oranges and lemons from the equator. As some critics have noticed, all these exotic products are the fruits of international free trade. And Scrooge’s extravagant expenditure is both philanthropic and commercial: he increases Bob Cratchit’s wages, pays a boy to purchase the butcher’s prize turkey and employs a cab driver to transport it to Cratchit’s house.”
But was Dickens hinting at government intervention as a solution? The most extreme form of government intervention – socialism or communism – has not helped the average worker. I studied in the Soviet Union and while there was “equality” in the USSR much of it was equality at a low economic level and with little political freedom. In contrast, those who held well-connected political and bureaucratic positions in the Soviet Union had access to most of the goods available to consumers in America. Cuba is a similar story. In Venezuela, the government’s economic policies turned a relatively prosperous country into one where millions of people have fled as political and economic refugees.
Even where economic intervention is less extreme, proponents need to be honest about the trade-offs of raising costs, both directly and indirectly, for employers. In France, it is much more difficult to fire someone than in the United States. However, this relative inability to fire or lay off workers makes French employers less likely to hire workers in the first place. French President Emmanuel Macron has attempted to address this issue. Still, the unemployment rate in France is 8.5% compared to 3.5% in the United States. The unemployment rate in Greece and Spain is over 14%. Even in Sweden, the unemployment rate is 6.8%.
Others have noticed a more nuanced portrait of Ebenezer Scrooge. “Scrooge’s character defect is not so much greed as miserliness,” writes William Pike in an article for the Foundation for Economic Education. “He hoards his money even at the expense of personal comfort. . . . Though the protagonist throughout A Christmas Carol might be Bob Cratchit, there are sympathetic characters who are, in fact, capitalists. Fezziwig, a man of business, nevertheless treats his employees like family. And then there are the easily overlooked ‘portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold,’ collecting money to ‘buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth.’”
“Dickens is not attempting to argue against capitalism, nor is he arguing against a free market for labor. He is arguing against personal callousness and against misanthropy,” according to Pike. “Indeed, Scrooge himself, on that transformative Christmas morning, does not renounce capitalism. Instead, he promises to be a better man. He will live a fuller life and share his good fortune with those close to him.”
“A Christmas Carol exemplifies, on a personal level, what Dickens was really arguing for,” writes Pike. “He was not calling for state intervention, nor for economic regulations. Instead, he argued on behalf of personal philanthropy. In the end, Scrooge helps Tiny Tim, not because of socialist ideals, but because his humanity is reawakened, causing him to care for this child.”
A Christmas Carol ends happily not by the British Parliament passing new legislation but by Ebenezer Scrooge treating people with compassion.
