Rock Chartrand

Capitalism is perhaps the most misunderstood economic system in history, largely because it is routinely blamed for the consequences of violating its own principles. Capitalism means private property, individual rights, voluntary trade, and a government limited to protecting those rights. It is a system in which individuals are free to produce, compete, trade, and prosper without requiring political permission or favoritism. Cronyism, by contrast, means government granting economic privileges through subsidies, bailouts, tariffs, regulations designed to protect favored businesses, and other forms of political favoritism. Socialism, communism, fascism, theocracy, absolute monarchy, feudalism, mercantilism, corporatism, and cronyism differ in their doctrines, methods, and objectives. Yet all have permitted political authority or privileged groups to override individual economic freedom. The fundamental distinction is between voluntary exchange and political coercion. Under capitalism, economic success depends on creating value that others voluntarily choose to purchase. Under cronyism, political influence can substitute for earning that success through trade. This brings us to the mixed economy, where elements of capitalism coexist with government intervention, redistribution, regulation, and political favoritism. When intervention produces unintended consequences, critics routinely attribute those failures to capitalism simply because they occurred in an economy containing private businesses and markets. That is a fundamental error of causation. The existence of private businesses does not make every government policy capitalist. Nor does the existence of wealthy businessmen make political favoritism a product of free markets. A businessman who earns a fortune through voluntary trade and one who obtains privileges through political coercion are operating on fundamentally different principles. Pure laissez-faire capitalism has never been fully implemented. Yet to the extent economic freedom has existed, it has demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to create wealth, increase productivity, encourage innovation, and raise living standards. And here lies the great irony. The remaining economic freedom continues to generate much of the wealth that makes government intervention and redistribution possible, while helping cushion society against their destructive consequences. Critics then demand further intervention to remedy problems caused or aggravated by previous interventions, perpetuating a cycle in which political power expands while capitalism receives the blame. Before blaming capitalism for any economic problem, establish whether that problem arose from voluntary exchange or the coercive exercise of political power. You cannot reasonably condemn a system for the consequences of violating its principles while ignoring the benefits produced when those principles are respected.

A capitalist needs money and profit, but neither has to be their primary motivation. A farmer may want to feed people, a doctor to heal them, a lawyer to pursue justice, or an entrepreneur to create something extraordinary. Profit allows them to sustain, improve, and expand their work. Communism, meanwhile, makes claims on other people's production central to its economic system, demanding that wealth be distributed according to politically determined needs. The irony is that capitalists are accused of caring only about money, while communists make controlling its distribution a central political objective. The capitalist understands that to sustain himself, he must earn money by producing value others are willing to pay for. The communist believes he's entitled to a share of what others produce, whether they consent or not. One relies on voluntary trade. The other ultimately relies on coercive redistribution. The communist is more obsessed with money, particularly someone else's.

What's painful is watching communists confuse capitalism with cronyism and corporatism, then demand even greater government control over the economy. They complain about politicians picking winners and losers, then advocate giving politicians even more power to do precisely that. They blame free markets for problems created or aggravated by government intervention, then prescribe more intervention as the cure. Perhaps they should examine how much of what they despise comes from the very powers they want expanded.

When I was young, I feared losing the people I loved. As I get older, their deaths increasingly remind me that one day I'll lose my own life too. I don't fear death because I'm unhappy with life. I fear it because I value life so much. Another 40 healthy years would be wonderful, but I'd still want 400 more. I understand that death is inevitable, but understanding something doesn't mean I have to welcome it. I don't want to make peace with dying. I want to make the most of living. And perhaps the cruelest part of aging is realizing that while the time you have left keeps shrinking, your desire to live doesn't.

I want to like the right. I even want to like the left. Both have values I can appreciate, and both have the potential to defend individual freedom with far less principled disagreement than their tribalism suggests. I'd welcome a left that consistently defended personal liberty and a right that consistently defended economic liberty. My loyalty is to principles, not political teams. I judge individuals by their ideas, actions, and character, not their political allegiance. I want everyone's individual rights protected, including those who disagree with me. I don't want anyone's rights sacrificed to satisfy my preferences, nor mine sacrificed to satisfy theirs. And if I criticize the right more often, it isn't because I necessarily consider them worse than the left. It's because I expect those who profess to defend capitalism, individual rights, and limited government to live up to those principles. Are they actually defending them, or merely paying lip service? And increasingly, are they even bothering with the lip service? Look at their actions, their policies, and their consequences. Judge them by the standards they claim to uphold, especially when those standards become politically inconvenient. I refuse to excuse authoritarianism because it comes from my side, accept tyranny because it's less severe than the alternative, or surrender my principles to defeat someone who has already surrendered theirs. I want a government that protects everyone's freedom to make their own choices, succeed or fail by their own judgment, and live for their own sake. Freedom includes the right to make choices I disagree with. Tyranny remains tyranny even when imposed by people I agree with.

An independent thinker judges ideas by their merits, principles by their consistency, and people by their actions, regardless of whose side they're on. A tribal sycophant judges all three by their allegiance. One is willing to stand alone rather than betray his convictions. The other is willing to betray his convictions rather than stand alone. One seeks the truth. The other seeks approval.

If the far left is bad and the far right is bad, why assume the ordinary left and right are good? Perhaps the problem isn't how far people take their principles, but the principles themselves. If moderating a principle makes it better, perhaps you're merely limiting the damage that following it to its logical conclusion would cause.

The left won't save you from the right, nor the right from the left. Both increasingly treat your life as theirs to centrally plan rather than yours to live, with rights they're supposed to protect. Their political survival depends on convincing you that you need them to manage your life. If their interventions delivered everything promised, you'd eventually stop needing them. That creates a perverse incentive: promise solutions, expand authority, spend your money, and when the interventions fail, use that failure to justify even more intervention. Failure becomes an argument for more power, never less. A government limited to protecting individual rights would have a permanent, legitimate purpose: protecting your freedom to succeed or fail by your own choices.

I find it remarkable how some people on both the left and right confuse "I want this" with "I have a right to this." Whether it's something they want others forced to provide or something they want others forbidden from doing, their preferences somehow become everyone else's obligations. That's not how individual rights work.

You have a right to what you paid for under the terms you agreed to. You don't have a right to force a company to sell you something under terms you prefer, maintain a service indefinitely, or surrender its intellectual property rights. If a company deceives customers, enforce the contract. If customers dislike the terms, they can refuse the purchase. Consumer preferences don't become individual rights simply because a politician promises to enforce them.

If we're actually pro-life, why stop at paid maternity leave? Why not government-funded housing, food, clothing, childcare, and everything else necessary to sustain life? And if someone refuses to pay for your definition of being pro-life, what happens to them? You're using a moral aspiration to justify a political obligation, without establishing who has the right to impose it.

If labor alone creates value, why does a worker with an excavator produce vastly more than one with a shovel? Should the worker be paid less because the machine does most of the physical work? And if the machine increases his productivity, why shouldn't the person who invested in it earn a return? Capital matters. Investment matters. Innovation matters. Labor doesn't create prosperity in isolation.

Socialists claim you'd be better off if land were publicly owned instead of privately owned. Better off how? Instead of owning your home, you'd depend on politicians deciding who gets to live where, under what conditions, and for how long. Instead of buying, selling, developing, or using land by voluntary agreement, you'd need political permission. And when they say the land would belong to everyone, ask what happens when one person disagrees with how it's used. Public ownership doesn't give everyone control. It gives political authorities control in everyone's name. You're promised a share of everything while surrendering your right to own anything.

American cosplay communists love pointing to China as a success story. There's just one embarrassing detail. China became substantially more prosperous after abandoning much of Mao's economic model and embracing private enterprise, profits, investment, and market competition. Meanwhile, the Communist Party retains authoritarian control over the economy, making its system resemble fascist corporatism in important respects. So their communist success story depends on capitalist economic reforms operating under an authoritarian state. Quite the advertisement for communism.

Socialism doesn't even have a good record when explained by socialists. Before gaining power, it's often a promise of ever greater consumption with little regard for the production required to sustain it. Once in power, authoritarian socialist regimes have relied on confiscation, coercion, forced labor, and wealth created under capitalism to pursue those promises. The problem with socialism has never been who's explaining it. It's the principles being defended and the consequences of putting them into practice.

Who designed the car? Who invented the technology? Who invested the capital, built the factories, organized production, assumed the risks, and created the jobs? Are these people not laboring too? Capitalism allows all these people to cooperate voluntarily, each contributing according to their abilities and being compensated according to mutually agreed terms. The difference between systems goes far beyond who gets paid. It's who gets to decide, who owns the results, and whether cooperation is voluntary or compulsory. And that's a rather important distinction.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Subsidize something and you incentivize more of it, often at a higher cost. Now apply that principle to a system that taxes productivity to subsidize need. You create incentives to produce less, demand more, and shift the growing burden onto those who remain productive. And when the system struggles to deliver, the answer is invariably to demand more from those producing.

Socialists argue that capitalism requires a slave class because people must work to earn a living. But what's their alternative? Is it somehow more moral to force someone else to work to sustain both themselves and you? If having to provide for yourself constitutes slavery, what does that make forcing others to provide for you? Reality requires production before consumption. Capitalism doesn't impose that requirement. Nature does. The moral question is whether you're entitled to force someone else to bear that burden for you.

Why are we supposed to assume that businessmen, particularly wealthy ones, are uniquely malevolent? Doesn't the small business owner seek profit? The worker who negotiates a higher wage? The politician seeking power? Doesn't everyone pursue some form of personal gain? Why is self-interest considered perfectly legitimate until someone becomes sufficiently successful? The relevant moral distinction is how that gain is pursued: through production, voluntary trade and mutual benefit, or through coercion, fraud and exploitation. We should judge people by their actions, not their bank balances.

Let's correct that. Your standard is that if a business doesn't pay whatever wage socialists demand, it shouldn't be permitted to employ anyone. Never mind what the worker is willing to accept, what their labor produces, or what the employer can afford. By that standard, you'd price many small businesses out of existence, protect their larger competitors from competition, and make it harder for those who need jobs most to find one. You've decided that denying someone the opportunity to earn a living is preferable to allowing them to earn less than you demand. How exactly does that improve their standard of living?