The issue with capitalism is not the idea itself but capitalists. When you remove the moral guardrails as did Milton Friedman when he made giving stockholders the highest return then you open the door to "greed is good". And in time, that corrupts as Paul wrote "the LOVE of money is a root of all kinds of evil". If you want to understand why so many in the younger generations embrace nonsense like socialism then just ask yourself what has been their experience with capitalism and capitalists.
Capitalists in a capitalist system are managed by market forces. The issue is not capitalism, but rather corporatism/cronyism, where people leverage government to distort the market in their favor.
I don't think it's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy to point out that the problems with such distortions aren't themselves "free market." We are VERY far from a free market system in the US, but unfortunately the problems that are caused by cronyism and corporatism are blamed on capitalism. We do the idea of liberty an injustice when we allow that to happen.
I'm reminded of how many college professors were thrilled when Soviet Russia collapsed because detractors could no longer point to the USSR as an example of communism in practice. And let's be honest, there has never been on this earth a situation where there has been a truly free market untouched by the darker side of human nature. What kept us from sliding into cronyism and corporatism as it is today were the moral guardrails that Milton Friedman removed with his formulation of capitalism.
Oh, I think that we were destined to cronyism well before Friedman. When government started to get large, the incentives to seek from it grew as well. Thank Wilson for that.
Any system is only as good as the people who have the power of government at hand. Capitalism has no inherent element of persistence - like liberty, it requires constant vigilance.
One more note. Capitalism is not utopia. It is simply better than everything else tried to date. Critics commonly employ nirvana fallacies, in that they compare it to some impossible ideal rather than to the alternatives.
I still don't agree. What moral guardrails were there? A business owner works to put money in his pocket, so why is it that a corporation doing the same is wrong?
What's the difference between "ambition" and "greed?"
In the land where the poorest among us owns three homes and the average owned is seven, there will be envy of the one who owns twenty. And Marxism will seek to exploit that envy. The man may have been evil, but he was no idiot about human nature.
“Marx saw socialism as the next societal evolutionary step after capitalism. Marx was wrong. Capitalism, liberty, free enterprise, laissez-faire, whatever you want to call it, rooted in a system that protects individual rights (including individuals' property rights) is the pinnacle of societal evolution, given the reality of human biology. Socialism and communism may promise a "nicer" society with utopian outcomes, but unless and until human biology "catches up" with societal evolution to produce “for the collective good” tendencies in all of us, they're actually stray paths that lead to misery and destruction. And, given that natural selection will always motivate "selfish" behavior, biology's never going to "catch up" to the point where collectivist ideas become biologically hard-wired.“
The issue with capitalism is not the idea itself but capitalists. When you remove the moral guardrails as did Milton Friedman when he made giving stockholders the highest return then you open the door to "greed is good". And in time, that corrupts as Paul wrote "the LOVE of money is a root of all kinds of evil". If you want to understand why so many in the younger generations embrace nonsense like socialism then just ask yourself what has been their experience with capitalism and capitalists.
Capitalists in a capitalist system are managed by market forces. The issue is not capitalism, but rather corporatism/cronyism, where people leverage government to distort the market in their favor.
I don't think it's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy to point out that the problems with such distortions aren't themselves "free market." We are VERY far from a free market system in the US, but unfortunately the problems that are caused by cronyism and corporatism are blamed on capitalism. We do the idea of liberty an injustice when we allow that to happen.
I'm reminded of how many college professors were thrilled when Soviet Russia collapsed because detractors could no longer point to the USSR as an example of communism in practice. And let's be honest, there has never been on this earth a situation where there has been a truly free market untouched by the darker side of human nature. What kept us from sliding into cronyism and corporatism as it is today were the moral guardrails that Milton Friedman removed with his formulation of capitalism.
Oh, I think that we were destined to cronyism well before Friedman. When government started to get large, the incentives to seek from it grew as well. Thank Wilson for that.
Any system is only as good as the people who have the power of government at hand. Capitalism has no inherent element of persistence - like liberty, it requires constant vigilance.
That may be but it was Friedman who really greased the skids in my opinion which is ironic considering how big he was against government intervention.
One more note. Capitalism is not utopia. It is simply better than everything else tried to date. Critics commonly employ nirvana fallacies, in that they compare it to some impossible ideal rather than to the alternatives.
I still don't agree. What moral guardrails were there? A business owner works to put money in his pocket, so why is it that a corporation doing the same is wrong?
What's the difference between "ambition" and "greed?"
In the land where the poorest among us owns three homes and the average owned is seven, there will be envy of the one who owns twenty. And Marxism will seek to exploit that envy. The man may have been evil, but he was no idiot about human nature.
Peter! I read your essays to develop and refine my mind!😁👍
“Marx saw socialism as the next societal evolutionary step after capitalism. Marx was wrong. Capitalism, liberty, free enterprise, laissez-faire, whatever you want to call it, rooted in a system that protects individual rights (including individuals' property rights) is the pinnacle of societal evolution, given the reality of human biology. Socialism and communism may promise a "nicer" society with utopian outcomes, but unless and until human biology "catches up" with societal evolution to produce “for the collective good” tendencies in all of us, they're actually stray paths that lead to misery and destruction. And, given that natural selection will always motivate "selfish" behavior, biology's never going to "catch up" to the point where collectivist ideas become biologically hard-wired.“
EMBRACE LIBERTY Motto for 2023