The thirteen arguments are:
1. Liberal capitalism increases freedom.
2. People work harder in liberal capitalist systems.
3. People work smarter under liberal capitalism.
4. Liberalism increases individuality and creativity.
5. Liberal capitalism increases the average standard of living.
6. The poor are better off under liberal capitalism.
7. Liberal capitalism generates more philanthropy.
8. More outstanding individuals flourish under liberal capitalism.
9. Liberalism’s individualism increases happiness.
10. Liberal capitalist societies are more interesting.
11. Tolerance increases under liberal capitalism.
12. Sexism and racism decrease under capitalism.
13. Liberal capitalism leads to international peace.
And here is the full playlist at YouTube.
Number 12 is most important for me because many people mistakenly believe that capitalism is the cause of racism and sexism. I know in college I was told that capitalism was responsible for slavery, poverty and everything in between. I try to tell people that the south was an agrarian/feudal society. And was by no means a free economy. It was more of an authoritarian economy of which Plato and his offspring Marx would be proud. Unfortunately, these ideas still hold for people who have been poorly educated, and don’t even bother to educate themselves.
Too bad hardly anybody on the Left believes any of that.
An interesting follow-up question, Bret, is why they don’t. Also, I’ve come across plenty of people on the Right who reject many or most of those arguments too.
Yes, it’s odd, Scherie, since racism and slavery existed long before capitalism. And it was in the more liberal capitalist nations that the battle against both was first joined and has been the most successful.
“An interesting follow-up question … is why they don’t.”
Each of the 13 arguments has a different answer for why they don’t. In generalities:
1. Humans are emotional animals and are more easily swayed by narrative and anecdote than the multivariate empiricism that’s required to show the correlations of many of those points. There’s always plenty of anecdotes to the contrary of each of the 13 arguments.
2. Correlation isn’t causation anyway, and the logic and knowledge required to understand the mechanisms underlying the causation is difficult and often counter intuitive and not necessarily provable.
3. There are many demagogues with vested interest in convincing people those 13 arguments are untrue and in fact evil. For example, in this regard, Krugman makes Goebbels look like a rank amateur.
4. The word “capitalism” itself has many negative connotations (I greatly prefer “free market,” which, though somewhat different, avoids the negatives of “capitalism”). The media has done a great job of painting capitalists in a bad light, and many corporations have formed symbiotic relationships with the government to fleece the citizenry (crony-capitalism).
5. Many of the features of capitalism are considered bugs by the Left. For example, increasing the standard of living is considered by many to be bad for the environment (i.e. it uses more resources).
6. Etc.
Or maybe that was a rhetorical question?
Mises summed it up well:
“The much abused ‘shopkeepers’ have abolished slavery and serfdom, made woman the companion of man with equal rights, proclaimed equality before the law and freedom of thought and opinion, declared war on war, abolished torture, and mitigated the cruelty of punishment. What cultural force can boast of similar achievements? Bourgeois civilization has created and spread a well-being, compared with which all the court life of the past seems meagre.”
– Socialism, p. 398
I see the biggest problem as being the failure to clearly isolate the essence of and precisely define what capitalism is.
It has been branded many things – usually by its enemies, who equate it with mercantilism, corporatism, anarchism, a kind of soft fascism and indispensable foundation for the hard, and even communism e.g. the alleged “state capitalism” practiced by Stalin et al.
But if it were any of these there would be no need for the extra term.
Historically capitalism has usually been confounded with other systems in which it was mixed and/or in which it was evolving, and for whose shortcomings it almost invariably took the blame, such as the British mercantile system bred of the privilege of monarchy, aristocracy, class and guild with its resultant disenfranchisement of populations in which the early industrial revolution was born – within several generations radically improving the lot of the working poor.
The need for church-state separation is now generally understood in the West i.e. so no religious organization can be specially favored and promoted by the state to the detriment of others. What needs to be spotlighted is the need for economy-state separation i.e. so no business organization, including corporation, can be specially favored and promoted by the state to the detriment of others i.e. that what secularism is to religion, capitalism is to economics.
As has been noted, philosophically capitalism remains an implicit idea yet to be discovered by both the broad masses of people and the intellectuals (the latter still largely in the grip of the German reaction to liberalism and the Enlightenment).
Unfortunately today, particularly in America, nothing has done more to shred the credibility of capitalism as an option for educated secular minded individuals than the kooky religious right, who gravitated to a poorly grasped conception of it in their blind groping for the original ideas that made America great.
Edward,
I agree with everything you wrote until the last paragraph, which I mostly can’t decipher. I have no idea what the “kooky religious right’s” conception of capitalism is, at least as far as how it turns off “educated secular minded individuals.” Can you elucidate?
I mean that among educated, secular minded individuals advocacy of the free market has become intimately associated with the religious right – ironic in that it was originally part and parcel of the Enlightenment revolution against the privilege of church and state, and classical liberals for the most part characterized by their vigorous anti-clericalism.
Also, when I said that what secularism is to religion, capitalism is to economics, it may be better to say that what secularism is to ideas or philosophy, capitalism is to economics.
Perhaps most important is to separate capitalism from corporatism i.e. corporations in bed with the state, hence becoming a political “-ism.”
In the 20th century the struggle against it led to the most brutal, destructive and far reaching tyrannies of modern times, shaped by ideologies that continue to hold immense sway. The proposed solution then was to move from liberty to statism. The result was what was in fact the ultimate corporate nightmare: the totalitarian state. In it society, economy and state were melded into a monolithic entity ruled by a CEO who possessed not only economic power – but now owned the military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy and media untrammeled by bourgeois anachronisms like individual rights and habeas corpus. It was Pol Pot as the cure for Kenneth Lay. It has to be shown that the cure lies in the other direction, the same direction that broke the choke hold of the church over European society: Liberalism (in the original meaning of the word).
It wasn’t tougher regulations that broke the church’s choke hold but something it dreaded far more: the free market of ideas.
Capitalism, as the economic aspect of liberalism would cleanly sever the corporate-state nexus as it once severed the church-state – e.g. no bailouts – with public and pundits as zealously guarding the former as it now guards the latter, leaving those interests to face the dreaded prospect of having to resort to merit to survive – competing with the likes of Steve Jobs and Richard Branson who, while (unlike the rest of us) not without their shortcomings, produced things of actual value, making it by hard work, boldness of vision and tenacious resolve instead of political pull.
Kelley L. Ross Ph.D., instructor of philosophy and libertarian party candidate makes an excellent point:
“[In spite of] the exposure of Stalinism, the fall of communism, and the persistent stagnation of Euro-socialist economies … [Voters] are still turning to leftist solutions to leftist diseases in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States… [This] may be due to the circumstance that it has largely been conservative politicians and pundits who have supported the free market. The free market, however, and political Classical Liberalism in general, are not conservative forces and influences, but revolutionary ones. Conservatives are thus liable to find themselves ultimately uncomfortable, as various neo-conservatives have lately been discovering, with their implications. Freedom is corrosive of traditional mores and belief, to the horror of both conservatives and the trendy leftists resentful of the success of capitalism and, especially, the West.”
When capitalism and “greed” were being blamed for the BP Gulf oil spill American libertarian political writer and academic Sheldon Richman remarked in a similar context, “[The free market] has an airtight alibi. It didn’t exist.”
But I think Rand was correct to critique libertarianism for viewing politico-economic issues in isolation of wider philosophic context. It’s a point where I differ with Ludwig von Mises: though a non-practicing Jew and almost certainly an atheist, he chastised classical liberals for their vigorous anti-clericalism, arguing that they were alienating potential allies. Well today the religious right including figures like Michelle Bachmann have glommed onto him, undermining his perceived credibility as an option for secular minded people. With friends like this…
Correction: Richman remarked in THAT context. Borrowed from something I wrote on a different topic and forgot to delete the clause “in a similar context.”
Try as I may, I cannot conceive of this notion of a ‘free market’. It seems the ethereal product of I dealism, a Platonic ideal, not a realistist’s or pragmatist’s conception. It’s technical absence, so often observed by the apologists of our unhealthy income disparity, it also seems an eternally employable excuse for the unethical hoarding of capital, vs practical levels of taxation and social infastructure investment…’if only a the free market existed, then all would be well.” I am beginning to think that its more of a spiritual revelation, Harvey the Pooka, or a pink unicorn that only some inspired few can see…; )
Rog
Hi Roger:
Much of the free market is everywhere around us: People respect each others’ rights, they trade freely, they tolerate differences, they take responsibility for their lives, they place limitations on government power, and so on.
At the same time, there’s much anti-free-market as well.
So we do live in a mixed society — some elements are more or less free-market. There’s nothing Platonic about pointing out the free elements that do exist, the principles that they depend upon, and arguing that we should have more such freedom.
Love your book: Hicks, S., R.C. (2014). Explaining Postmodernism Skepticism and Socialism from
Rousseau to Foucault. Ockhanm’s Razor.
Thanks!