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A Moral Case for Capitalism
Free markets are based on “natural” or “negative” rights, while socialism and communism are based on “positive” rights. Negative rights are rights that we have that don’t require any action on anyone else’s part to provide. Rather, others must not act in order for us to enjoy these rights. For example, my right to life only obliges other people not to kill me. My right to religion obliges others not to burn down my place of worship. My right to free speech requires that others not silence me. Property rights obliges us not to take what isn’t ours.
Positive rights, by contrast, place a burden on others. For example, if Mr. Jones claims to have a right to free health care, then someone is obliged to provide that health care to him, and to bear the cost of providing it. Forcing some people to provide goods and services to others used to be called “slavery.”
Slavery, however, is no longer a popular form of coercion. The form of coercion currently in vogue is to force Mr. Rich to pay Dr. Smith to treat Mr. Jones. In practice, however, Ms. Not-so-Rich and Mr. Downright Poor are also usually forced to help pay Dr. Smith. All these people are required to pay for Jones’ health care even if they are poorer than Jones.
Positive rights also have practical consequences. Perhaps the biggest is that they create political conflict between people as they all try to live at each other’s expense. Also, positive rights have no limiting principle. Anything can be, and nearly everything has been, declared to be a “fundamental” human right.
Published in General
I also do not want to see a Federal government in which positive rights are embraced in the Constitution or in the preamble to any legislation (where they may be seized upon for the courts and frozen for all time), for the reasons you mention. But I remain confused over whether you are comparing capitalism to socialism & communism or to any form of government with coerced service (aka taxation). There are a whole spectrum of ways a government can operate in the space between anarcho-capitalism and socialism.
Let’s take things at a state or local level:
Is it immoral to require payment of taxes for schools if I have no children?
Is it immoral to requirement payment of taxes for roads if I don’t drive?
Is it immoral to require payment of government employee salaries if I don’t use their services?
I also can’t tell if you are making a relative morality argument regarding capitalism v socialism and communism or making the argument for capitalism as moral even in the absence of any other societal influences (for instance, religion).
My recommendation to stay away from the slavery analogy is simple. First, in an era where federal and state governments were much more constrained than today, capitalism happily existed alongside real slavery for over 70 years.
Second, if you are going to argue that making someone pay a medicare tax is the same as someone being seized from their native land, transported in terrible conditions across an ocean, sold on an auction block, forbidden to learn to read, enslaved for life, subject to being sold again, being beaten at the discretion of their owner, and having their spouse and children taken from them, I think you will have difficulty. At a minimum you will waste time you could have spent arguing the moral case for capitalism arguing about slavery.
You said it better than I. Thanks!
Pure evil.
The real evil of socialism, beyond the theft and coercion, is that it convinces people that they have the right to tell others how to live.
Sounds expensive. Oh, right, that was the point… :-/
I’ll cop to @mentioning Titus earlier on the thread — with a winky face.
To be honest, I think it’s part of American and perhaps larger Anglosphere culture for people to have an intuition about their “natural rights” that differs from philosophers’ definition of “natural rights”. Namely, the intuition is about rights which seem natural when people are used to liberty being their common lot in life. Which sounds ridiculously circular as an analytical statement, but I do believe a shared intuition, at least on the Anglosphere right, exists about the naturalness of certain rights irrespective of formal training in what philosophers have historically called “natural rights”.
They’ve moved beyond that. Now it’s “hate speech.”
I was taking you at your word, by your title. I was not talking past you. If you want to make the moral case against socialism go ahead, pretty certain several have typed similar articles. I am not opposed to trash talking socialism. But that is not what your title states.
I personally would find a moral argument in favor of free markets more interesting.
A fair point, and one to which I can accede.
Maybe I’m confusing the right with the mechanism by which one acquires property. Societies have to agree as to what constitutes a proper method of acquisition, right?
Last year a man died when police tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. After the incident did you ever wonder why there’s a law against the sale of “loosies”? It’s about taxes. Packs of cigarettes get stamped to indicate that they’ve been taxed. The sale of untaxed, and therefore unstamped, cigarettes is illegal. The problem with loosies is that you can’t tell if they came from a taxed/stamped pack.
Had the man not died, he would have been fined and, depending on priors, jailed. Conceivably, he might have shared his cell with someone else there for tax evasion.
Prison isn’t nearly as bad as slavery – there’s a finite sentence, your children don’t share your sentence – but it’s grim.
I think, then, that before we decide to use coercion to accomplish something – to prevent or punish a wrongful act, or pay for goods and services with taxes – we should ask ourselves two questions: Can this be done without coercion, and does it pass the “trigger test”? That is, would I be willing to kill someone to enforce this law or to collect taxes to pay for this thing?