Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What’s Capitalism Ever Done for Us?
Capitalism has:
- Ended the need for child labor by making workers productive enough that they could support a family. Before capitalism, child labor wasn’t considered a “problem,” it was simply what children had to do if they wanted to eat. Child labor was ended by law only after it had become an anomaly.
- Ended any possible excuse for slavery. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations, slavery was less efficient than free labor. In part, this was due to the amount of labor that had to be expended to keep the slaves at work, to hunt for them when they escaped, and to defend the community should they rebel.
- Placed women on an equal footing with men. Before capitalism, brute strength was the key to survival. Now, brains are far more important than brawn, and women are more than capable of competing with men on that basis.
- Ended any excuse for imperialism and colonialism. Adam Smith noted that trading with people in other nations to obtain goods is far less costly than trying to conquer and contain them.
- Established a framework for peaceful cooperation and coordination in which people can use resources to their best effect. In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “It is the market – the least overtly spiritual of contexts – that delivers a profoundly spiritual message. It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.”
Yes yes and yes
Excellent post.
Yes, of course that’s all true. But the outcomes are less than perfectly equitable. Ergo, the other approach to economic exchange, the one based on coercion and central planning rather than the free exchange of value, must necessarily be the better one. Because shut up.
To take your tongue-in-cheek argument seriously for a moment, it seems to me that material inequality is the inescapable result of material progress. If a new product is created, it cannot possibly be simultaneously distributed to every person on earth. So, the first time someone invented something – the stone hammer, perhaps – inequality instantly appeared in the world. To demand complete material equality is to demand an end to material progress.
And for those who think that market/economic-behavior is just a human-concept: Balderdash! We see supply-and-demand every day in the animal-kingdom; “fight-or-flight” is just another way of saying “cost/benefit analysis;” you could outlaw “The Market” tomorrow and there would still be a market for goods, services, and ideas.
Market/economic-behavior is the most natural thing the world…What is not natural are the attempts to control it.
Women are also competing with men on brawn. Have you seen pictures of female bodybuilders? Egad . . .
Fine post.
I do agree with Jonah Goldberg’s observation, in The Suicide of the West, that the free enterprise system relies on certain moral virtues and legal principles that it does not, by itself, create or support. The abundance produced by the free enterprise system actually seems to lead many people to fail to realize that prosperity is unusual, and to undermine the values and policies that make free enterprise possible.
Capitalism rewards people who possess, or who learn to develop, the so-called “bourgeois virtues” of self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, and tolerance. To the extent that it rewards those virtues, it creates an environment in which they will spread. Unfortunately, the government has been busily undermining them by paying people not to work and to produce fatherless children.
Capitalism also puts the decision making on the use of scarce capital with the folks that proven to be the most efficient at allocating capital. Other systems put the decision making with strongmen or “experts” that cannot possibly complete with meritocracy of true capitalism.
Paraphrasing Churchill on systems of government, I’d opine that capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
Short answer: capitalism beat the commies flat.
Also:
“What have the Romans ever done for us?” = What has colonialism ever done for us?
One current champion female weight lifter is, as I understand it, a man.
And the male professional body-builders are still way ahead of the (actually) female professional body-builders.
I hope that was just some kind of “jape,” not meant to be taken seriously. But even as a “jape” it seems too common these days to just let it slide.
Yes, SOME women are smarter than SOME men. So what? Some women are also physically stronger than some men. Again, so what? It really proves nothing overall. And you may be smarter than most – or even all? – men that you know. That would still prove nothing, overall. (Except maybe that you should meet more people.) Pauline Kael didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon, either. That didn’t stop him from winning.
Please don’t go down the “women are smarter than men” road. You seem to be a nice lady, and I would hate to have to refute you. (Not that it would actually be necessary, since I think most people still understand the reality.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmRDUcbx9tw
(“NSFW” I suppose)
Interesting response from kedavis.
Personally, I don’t mind the “women > men” quips and bumper stickers. The reality is that men pretty much rule the world, create most of the stuff and destroy most of the stuff, and are generally speaking in charge. I look at the pushback as a small concession to the fairer and weaker sex. It’s kind of cute, when women do it.
Help! I’ve been hijacked!
You just think you’ve been hijacked. My wife tells me you haven’t.
“Cute” is a good term for it in that context. But the results can be different if that’s what children pick up as supposedly being “real”/”true.”
I came across this years ago in comments to a story about how supposedly anyone can “learn to code.” If I were to write it myself, it would come out differently, but I found it very interesting. I would tend to probably add too much about “exceptions that prove the rule” etc.