On Mises Daily, author Kel Kelly tells us why he wrote The Case for Legalizing Capitalism—yes, thanks to overweening government interventionism, right now capitalism is quite literally against the law:
My urgent goal in writing The Case for Legalizing Capitalism was to create a one-stop refutation of all anti-capitalist arguments, using plain economic logic and applying free-market (i.e., classical liberal) arguments and economic laws to today’s political scene, across the entire political-economic spectrum.
…. My main message is that most of our economic problems derive from previous government intervention in the economy. In its attempts to “help” us, the government has managed and regulated the economy, and passed laws that sounded constructive but that in fact hurt the economy and us.
Look at how far we are from true capitalism:
In a truly capitalist society businesses never receive money or special privileges from government: they succeed if they please consumers in offering them what they want, and they fail if they do not. By the same token, in a truly capitalist society, individuals never receive special privileges or transfer payments. Instead, they have an abundance of jobs and of wages commensurate with the value of their work (more than a “living wage”).
…. A core tenet of leftists’ promotion of socialism is that it is moral, while capitalism is immoral. Not only do I show this is completely opposite from the truth, but I reveal that socialists are hypocritical, dishonest, thieving, and harm those they are supposedly trying to help (usually themselves).
Just a few of Kelly’s themes:
1. Regulation does not usually protect consumers, but merely benefits one group at the expense of another;
2. Redistributing wealth cannot possibly benefit the receivers in the longer term, but only hurt them;
3. Politicians cannot help us economically, they have no idea what they are doing, and they don’t care anyway, since their goal is simply to buy votes by selling the property of others.
If Kelly is right, in a truly capitalistic society the engines of production would be in overdrive, jobs would be superabundant, unemployment would be a matter of personal choice, freedom would be the norm, and poverty would be a thing of the past.
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Resources:
Kel Kelly’s article.
The Case for Legalizing Capitalism.
—Mike Gray
