Has Capitalism Failed Page 9

  These are the two choices that lead to two different forms of society. Do you create a society that leaves man free to be his own moral agent; or do you create a society that uses government to ensure that man serves the collective as prescribed by authorities? You must select either a free society, limited government, or a dictatorship, unlimited government.

  A limited government, by its nature, creates a capitalist society and the dynamism that comes from freedom. An unlimited government creates an authoritarian society and all the stagnation that comes with having a few people decide for a large number. Although it may be hard for some to accept, a capitalist society unleashes self-interest while an authoritarian society restricts people to sacrifice, altruism and self-denial.

  Today, in our society, there is a struggle between these two systems because we have not made up our minds about our view of man's nature. We have been flailing about, so to speak, and this has created our present situation where authoritarianism holds sway. The advocates of authoritarianism are now free to move forward to full control, full dictatorship.

  It is all about man’s method of survival. Notice I did not say it is about man’s nature. Man is a creature of a certain type. He survives by means of his mind. He uses reason and knowledge and makes choices based upon his findings. Man can only survive by means of thinking. If he decides to suspend his mind, there is only one other way to survive and that is by enslaving the men who think. That division we talked about above is specifically about this question: does man survive by means of his mind or does he survive by means of the minds of others? My view, my reason for favoring capitalism is that capitalism is the only economic system that enables man to survive by means of his mind and if he seeks to survive through the minds of others, he must turn those others into slaves. He must destroy the freedom of those men to survive.

  For instance, we’ve seen a pervasive negative attitude toward business in the media and the entertainment arts. Intellectuals, actors and commentators are forever sneering at the giants of industry, who, in their "ruthless" pursuit of profit, are supposedly breaking laws, cheating consumers, and generally, but successfully, making life miserable for us all. From the philosophical arena we are taught that those who seek self-interest necessarily must seek it at the expense of others. Such attitudes reach their lowest point in practice when a President of the United States scorns businessmen for not sacrificing themselves to the inflationary policies of the government (See Kennedy vs. U.S. Steel or Obama vs. just about everybody).

  The difference between those who favor authoritarianism and those who favor limited government is that authoritarians are empiricists. They slice reality up into hundreds of out-of-context critiques of capitalism where nothing connects and anything goes; whereas advocates for limited government hold that man should be free as a matter of right. For instance, an authoritarian develops no universal principles that relate to man except that he is an economic creature and that economic classes are the fundamental metaphysical principle. As a child of empiricism, the authoritarian believes that man is incapable of learning from sense experience and, because so, we can only try different approaches to social organization in order to define those that work. The result is a pragmatist who cannot see the difference between limited government and authoritarianism.

  An empiricist/pragmatist could be a Marxist who sees no connection between one era of history and another. He would say that during an earlier agricultural age, private property developed out of a need to protect crops from being trampled or stolen. According to this view, the idea of property might have been valid in that context, but when industrial society took shape, the idea became obsolete because of the advent of collective rights. These critiques of capitalism created whole new branches of so-called social sciences, with each science taking off in different directions yielding a myriad of conclusions and social engineering. The question was not how to establish a universal principle that was valid through the ages but how to manipulate one idea in a hundred different ways for the sake of accomplishing “social good”. You could study thousands of books about this and learn nothing more than that man must be coerced for his own good.

  What you have in these two views (limited government versus authoritarianism) is the genesis of two opposing systems of government, one that came out of European intellectual circles and the other that came out of American intellectual circles. One created dictatorship and the other the United States of America. The clash between these two views played out in two different periods; the first during the American Revolutionary War where a free society won and the other during World War I and World War II where the two sides fought to a stalemate. Although freedom won the wars during the previous century, the ideas of Europe prevailed intellectually and today European style totalitarianism is on the verge of taking over our country. We may soon experience the devastation that rocked Europe during the last century.

  Today, once again, capitalism is under attack. The diluted forms of capitalism that are common today (forms that are more mixed economies than capitalism) are about to be wiped out and forever disappear. The reason for this is that intellectuals in our society hate the individualism and egoism that are an intricate element of capitalism. The progressives' adherence to the Marxist critique of capitalism, and their hatred of profit, has left capitalism with almost no defense. Few are willing to fight for the right of the individual to be an egoist. Yet, that is what it would take for capitalism to be defended.

  In practically every philosophical discussion of egoism, we hear something like this: Is it right to seek one's self-interest in disregard for the interests of others? Yet, this is a loaded question. It is based upon a false critique that I call scarcity metaphysics, the idea that one man's good is another man's harm, that profit is theft. Such a view implies a total ignorance of property rights, and of the fact that what is rightfully owned by one man cannot in any way relate to the wellbeing of another. What one man earns has nothing to do with what any other man does for himself.

  The idea that egoism requires harm to someone neglects the basic principle of human interaction, the principle that makes economic coexistence possible; the principle of trade for mutual benefit. When people engage in trade, they each expect to gain from the transaction. The standard of living in those countries that have free trade policies is evidence that mutual benefit does take place and that the capitalist world is not a den of thieves.

  When Marxists and OWS[30] protestors tell us it is time to ditch capitalism, they want us to believe that capitalism causes harm to man and society. It is this lie about capitalism which must be challenged. Capitalism is a boon to mankind and the cause of all the good done by free economies. We should, instead, ditch socialism and re-distribution for they are the cause of harm to the productive and the good. Indeed, socialism is the criminal of history, the destroyer of good and abundance. Socialism is the cause of poverty, concentration camps, slavery and hunger.

  The idea that those who engage in trade are evil reveals a bias by authoritarians against self-interest and should remove them from serious consideration. These people should be ditched along with socialism, re-distribution and Marxism. That such thinking takes place in view of the obvious evidence against it is another example of the extent to which the idea of collective sacrifice has corrupted our culture.

  One problem with anti-capitalists and their arguments, almost to a man (woman), is that they assume capitalism to be steeped in conflict and contradiction. Perhaps this comes from their childhoods or from their mentors, but for some reason, they project a state of conflict into the very essence of capitalism. They frame all their arguments in terms of opposing forces and then paint themselves as “good” people seeking to defeat the “bad”. This is because they do not trust the human mind to correctly ascertain reality and their insecurity makes them want to construct reality so they can feel good about the false ideas they advocate.

  Yet, capitalism is about, indeed requires, prin
ciples such as cooperation, good will and a synthesis between the economic demands of consumers and the abilities of need fillers (capitalists); between those who are willing to buy and those whose job it is to develop the products and services they need. This is a peaceful process of value creation, value sales and mutual trade. No one forces bad products on people (that happens in cronyist systems such as fascism and socialism).

  In fact, capitalism is the most efficient matching of consumer needs with need fillers that has ever existed on the planet. This is because it lets “value production” rule “customer-demand”. In a sense, customers are allowed to vote in the free market which is calculated by counting orders and profits.

  In contrast to the cooperation inherent in capitalism, we have the "command" method of the controlled economies, where bureaucrats (technocrats) make production decisions, often guessing wrongly about demand, then expropriating the funds from society to correct the economic miscalculations they have made.

  Capitalism is a value system in which capitalists are free to fill real and immediate demands using their own or borrowed funds. They obtain their reward when the fulfillment of customer needs is achieved. Socialism, the command economy, is inefficient because it is based on bureaucratic decisions that are almost always wrong, too late, aimed at the wrong people and/or corrupt. The result is not success but subsidized loss.

  Capitalism is a perfect economic system because it liberates the producer to make what people need. When he does this across a vast economy, he tips off the capitalist about where to invest for future production. Everyone wins. Contrary to the unfounded criticism of socialists and other progressives, this essential principle known as “freedom in transactions” is all that capitalism is.

  The only “exploitation” found in capitalism would be if someone decided to deceive or otherwise cheat someone in a transaction. The saving feature of capitalism is that a cheater loses customers and goes out of business (or he goes to jail for fraud or some other crime). The overwhelming majority of such “consensual transactions”, however, result in both parties obtaining value for value (and this spurs innovation, product development and improvement as well as lower prices over time).

  Needless to say, the left is cynical about the mutuality of free trade in capitalism because it is cynical about man, his mind and his ability to survive. They take trade to be a cynical effort to cheat people. This, to them, is the essence of life: cheating; and that makes the only cheaters in the debate over capitalism and socialism to be the socialists. They are cheating man out of his need to survive.

  Socialism is full of inefficiencies because its goal is not the satisfaction of consumer demand but of invented "social" needs. These “needs” are supposedly fulfilled, under socialism, by unwilling providers and presented in a “take it or leave it” manner with little concern for the desires of the consumer. The only “satisfied” party in a socialist transaction is the central authority.

  In order to understand how a proper society should work, we should realize that, in a sense, every man is a Robinson Crusoe. And this fact is what makes every man a capitalist and every capitalist an egoist. Every man must find ever more efficient methods for improving his survival. For Robinson Crusoe, his goal was a better life on a desert island. For modern man, his goal is a higher standard of living. But like Robinson Crusoe, modern man must find a way to lighten the effort needed for bare survival. He does it through production. Production creates the profit that yields the opportunity for a higher standard of living. If a man's productive efforts yield him more than he needs for bare survival, he can then look around for those products that help in raising the quality of his life; he creates demands for such products and thereby stimulates their production; he creates a need for advertising and promotion of such products so he can be made aware of what is available.

  In contrast, the controlled economy is based on consumption only without reference to the votes of the consumers. By destroying property rights, this system thinks it can obtain the results that derive from property rights through a coercive takeover of the factories. Their critique that property rights worked in an agricultural society but are not necessary in an industrial society is the reason they cavalierly dismiss capitalists and expropriate (monopolize) the factories. What they don't understand is that machines don't run themselves, they need human intelligence and a rational goal and the only person willing to apply his intelligence to machines is the person who has a stake in them.

  Reality tells us that the existence of high capacity machines does not eliminate the need for property rights. In fact, property rights are a concept that recognizes an enduring need of man; that he functions better when his right to keep what he creates is recognized. Property rights worked in a primitive society of two people five million years ago; they work in an advanced society of millions today and will work on a spaceship in some distant future transporting hundreds of colonists to a new planet. Property rights do not become obsolete with new machines; they become more necessary as the machines become more advanced. Better machines do not create collectivism.

  This means that every man is a businessman and every businessman is a worker: in order to survive, he must produce, and in order to survive well, he must produce more than is necessary for bare subsistence. This law applies all across the economic spectrum from Robinson Crusoe to Bill Gates. To preach that profits are exploitation is not only an attack on disembodied corporations; it is an attack on every person.

  Man is not merely mired to bare subsistence. He is also a creature of pleasure who yearns for rest, enjoyment and celebration. He needs to produce more than he consumes because he needs to experience the totality of being human. Only surplus production can make this possible.

  By nature, man is an egoist…and this is not a bad thing; it is a quality that makes enjoyment and higher thinking possible. It preaches accomplishment and joy; the value of work and intellect and brings the ability to understand and experience the magnificence of life (and the experience of this wondrous universe). Its hallmark is human value and loving life.

  On the other hand, subsistence economics, as is the economics of socialism, is a scheme to subvert man's happiness, undertaken by those who would dictate his choices and steal the surplus he produces. It is no accident that authoritarians take little consideration of man's ability to choose for himself, and that they preach their theories in the midst of the most technologically advanced economy in human history. They preach it, not in spite of the greatness of the productive U.S. citizen, but because of it. They have to find a way, through deception, to convince the American citizen that he has the most corrupt system ever devised; not so they can make things better for him but so they can take over his property and especially his machines. It is a conman’s game they are playing. Like the savages they are, when the machines stop, they'll point their guns at the closest person and tell him to fix the machines or else.

  Has capitalism failed?

  Hardly. It is socialism that is failing around the world.

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  About Robert Villegas

  Robert Villegas is an Indiana Author specializing in fiction, romance, theater and philosophy. He was born in South Texas (Weslaco) but raised in Indiana. He is Hispanic-American but American in every sense of the word. He has spent a lifetime in the business world as a UPS executive and also worked in locations all over the United States and Europe. He is an Army veteran who served as a telecommunications specialist serving in the 7th Infantry Division in Camp Casey, Korea. He was educated in Indiana and earned a Degree through the University of the State of NY (Albany) via an external degree program. He is divorced with three grown children and three grandchildren.

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