Originally posted 2017-03-03 06:58:38.
There is no alternative to Capitalism in a free society. Removing it would also necessarily remove the foundation of Enlightened Culture. As I wrote here, that foundation is that we all own our own bodies and lives. They are ours to do as we will with, so long as we do not harm others. If we so choose, we may use them to earn and acquire property, which is Capital. Once acquired, it is ours to keep or exchange.
Removing Capitalism dispossesses us of our own lives and bodies, since it prevents us from using them to acquire things. Worse, it assumes that, since our bodies and lives are not our own, they must belong to someone or something else. This has been the Family, the State, the Tribe, the Earth, the Party, the Church, the Crown, the Faith; you name it. Our most precious freedom, to live our own lives with our own bodies, is removed when we attempt to remove Capitalism.
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Freedom
As soon as freedom is removed, under whatever pretext, the door is open to dictators and totalitarian, collectivist regimes. We have seen enough of what they do whenever they can.
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As long as people are free, there will be Capitalism and as long as one major economy remains Capitalist, then it will outperform and ultimately overwhelm all others. Capitalism has already seen off myriad, powerful rival systems, through Feudalism to Imperialism. It overwhelmed the first attempts to set up Marxist states. It long ago broke the second, post-1945 attempts in the UK and elsewhere to do the same.
In its new alliance with Islam, feminism and race supremacists, Marxism has bought itself a new set of clothes in which to deceive us. But it will not prevail as long as there are people who believe in freedom.
The world’s problems — which are real — do not derive from Capitalism per se but from the legacy of previous, totalitarian systems, political interference and closed markets. Many stem from an unwillingness — largely on the part of Western property-owners and workers — to accept that a global free market must result in the price of property and labour becoming more or less the same throughout the world.
Globalisation
Globalisation has never been about bringing the Third World up to First World standards; it has always been about reducing the standards of the latter. Simple statistics tell us that the small number of First World inhabitants must lose greatly in order to raise the level of the rest only a small amount.
Depending on the measure, there are a billion or fewer people in the First World. Their median incomes are much higher than in the rest of the world. But there are seven billion people in the rest. So, brutally, each individual in the West has to have the difference between his or her income and the mean of Third World per capita income shared between eight, which basically means Europeans and Americans working for a dollar or less an hour — just as they do in south-east Asia, for example.
Western nations pay lip-service to the idea of free trade but use market interventions to prevent it. In heritable property they impose planning rules, zoning and other limitations, whose function is to keep the price of property high and benefit those who already own it. On labour, they attempt to elevate the price through ‘minimum wages’ and — incredibly — actually paying employers to pay their workers.
That is not free Capitalism.
Leftists are either lying or untutored
Leftists who claim that wage levels in the West can be maintained alongside unrestricted immigration and movement of capital are either lying or untutored in economics. Knowing the Left and its disdain for uncomfortable truths intimately, I have no doubt it is largely the former.
However, Woke Culture, the Brownshirt cutting edge of the modern Left’s rag-tag of bogus economics and ‘Social Justice’, is a product not only of Marxism, feminism and race supremacism, but also of New Age culture and Postmodernism. The former is a diaphanous, touchy-feely nonsense that believes in fairies at the bottom of the garden and ‘crystal healing’ and the latter is a ‘post truth’ philosophy that eschews observable reality in favour of ‘narrative’ and ‘lived experience’. In other words, these people would not know reality if it up and bit them — which is exactly what would happen, were they to be successful in their stated aims.
Choice
Today, Western nations have a choice: they either accept the global market, which must mean a property and labour price crash, or they become isolationist and protect their local economies through tariff barriers and particularly, shutting off immigration so that the price of property and labour remains high in their protected market. There is no middle ground.
Doing this has a cost, which will ultimately have to be paid; it is already the reason for the trillions of dollars that Western governments owe. However, all of these State systems could collapse under the weight of their own interventions and Capitalism would still come out the winner. (The UK economy is so dependent on grossly inflated property values that were the global levelling to occur, it would go under. )
Donald Trump was right. In order to maintain the standard of living of American workers, it must make its market less accessible to foreign ones, either those located in the United States or those outside it. The same is true in Britain. The Left hates him because he identified the truth and spoke it.
Capitalism is the natural economic system
If there is a ‘natural’ economic system for the world, it must be Capitalism; it is completely organic and evolutionary. It is responsive to the slightest market pressure and provides instant solutions where planned economies might take years. But these are not the reasons Capitalism succeeds.
It is successful because wherever there are people who have things they do not want and desire things they do not have, it provides the answer. You want your roof fixed? Pay a man. You want to get some money? Sell something. It could not be simpler or more robust. It even works with direct barter, in moneyless economies.
In their ‘Communist’ phase, which they are keen, today, to forget, Marxists were fond of saying that ‘human nature doesn’t exist’. Well, it ‘didn’t exist’ so much that it destroyed their murderous social experiments, like the Soviet Union. Trading is natural to humans and we have been doing it since the Middle Palaeolithic, 120,000 years ago.
Anti-freedom
The Left is totalitarian, anti-freedom, statist and controlling. That is why it has spread its legs for Islam, a vicious form of patriarchy that has the same qualities — and some much-needed votes. Together, they hope to destroy Capitalism, free society, Enlightened Culture and individual liberty.
There is nothing new in this; the modern Left is just one of many attempts to destroy the free market and enslave us, over tens of thousands of years. These have ranged from warlords at the head of bands of thugs, through feudal monarchs, colonial imperialists, expeditionary armies of conquest and more, to idiot academics and philosophers who should shut up and let reality get on with it.
Capitalism: the Tigger of Economics.
Every single one, repeatedly, has failed. Capitalism bounced back bigger, stronger and bouncier than ever before. It is the Tigger of Economics and there is no alternative to it in a free society.
Every collectivist social experiment has collapsed, usually catastrophically and frequently with massive bloodshed. From Mesopotamia to Siberia to Cambodia to the Balkans, we see exactly where these ‘improvements’ get us: torture, political imprisonment, assassinations, forced labour, famine, horror, genocide. The ultimate end of ‘Social Justice’ is death and enslavement.
Yes we have a fight, but no, we are not going to lose. Our enemy’s face is known and so is his modus operandi. The Left and its fellow travellers shall not prevail.