Friday, December 18, 2009

Down with Capitalism!

So, down with capitalism, eh?

If a man is unable to provide for his needs all by himself (and aside from a few survivalists living off the land in the middle of nowhere this is all of us) then he must secure to cooperative effort of his fellow men to provide for his needs or he will die. If capitalism (the free and voluntary exchange of goods and services, possibly, though not necessarily aided by the abstraction of work effort called money) is off the table, then what means is available to secure this cooperation?
So we may pass a law stating that one man must give his property (goods/services) to another man. What if the first man refuses, then what? We must then come to take his property from him by force or the law will not accomplish it's aim. What if he resists our force with his own? We would then have to escalate our force to surpass his until either he acquiesces or he dies.
Given this set of incentives, what rational person would ever produce any goods or supply any service? If no man voluntarily produced goods or services, then our survival would depend on the use of force (which, in order to function, would require a willingness to kill the objects of that force) to compel men to work to supply us with the goods and services we require. I wonder, has such a system ever existed in the past, and if so, what name would men have given it?

Of course, none of the men who are now advocating an end to capitalism would ever admit that the only other social structure that has ever existed is slavery under one name or another. Feudalism, fascism, communism, socialism, national socialism (which, as a matter of record, was originally defined as any socialist movement not loyal to the global socialist movement headquartered in Moscow) - they all require slavery in their implementation to function. This is what when politicians espouse their lofty goals of public charity and social justice, they always speak of the ends and never of the means that must be employed to reach those ends. The devil is always visible in the details, but he is present (though hidden) in the rhetoric.