Thursday, February 7, 2019

QUORA: 'Why do people think capitalism is ethical?'



I posted this answer:

By man’s individualist nature as a rational being, he must work productively, trade and associate with others, and keep what he has earned in order to survive and flourish. Therefore, man needs a free society, so that every person can earn his living in a social environment that abolishes physical force as a means of dealing with one another. The abolition of physical force is the prerequisite of freedom and the reason why the maintenance of an ethical society needs a government--to secure by law a force-free society, leaving voluntarism as the only legal means of human association.

It follows from man’s nature that the basic principles of a moral society are the recognition of each individual’s right to live and act according to the judgement of his own mind, so long as his actions do not violate the same rights of others. The highly essentialized principles of capitalism are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men are created equal, that are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

First come rights, then comes government. The overarching political principle embodied in those words is that the government--i.e., its elected or appointed officials--must be subordinated to the same moral law as the people it governs: Just as a private individual may not steal from, cheat, enslave, or kill--that is, initiate force against--another human being, so neither can government officials as representative of society steal, cheat, enslave, or kill. Nor may a proper government legally sanction such rights-violating actions by politically powerful private individuals or groups. Government’s only purpose is to act as the people’s agent of self-defense, securing their individual rights in an orderly process--i.e., through the rule of objective law, applied equally to all. The government is constitutionally bound to protect us from those who would violate another’s rights, without becoming the rights-violator. Capitalism is the consequence—the natural result of a republican, as opposed to democratic, form of government and constitution.

It is the protection of individual rights through the subordination of society and its government to moral law--that is, universal justice--that makes capitalism ethical. Ethics is fundamentally an individual, not a collective, issue. To be ethical means, in large part, to respect the rights of others. A government’s laws, to be just, must embody that respect. Capitalism does not guarantee that everyone will respect the rights of others. It guarantees that to the extent one respects the rights of others, he will be left politically, intellectually, and economically free. Capitalism--that is, laissez-faire capitalism--is the only social system that explicitly embodies these principles. Therefore, Capitalism is not only ethical. It is, to date, the only ethical social system.

An ethical society means a free society. A free society is a capitalist society. Volumes of theory and centuries of practice back this up. Of course, what we have now is not laissez-faire capitalism. We have a mixed economy of statism and freedom--that is, an economy burdened by economic regulation, redistributive taxation, cronyism, and an extortive political class. Here is a sampling of suggested reading to clarify understanding:




Related Reading:


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