Political conversations continue in the small language class where my classmates are left-leaning professionals. A recent one lamented the state of the world: Why can’t everyone just get along and not be so divided? The students were incredulous that not everyone agrees with them on how society should function. They hold social justice as key principle in a system where the government ensures “equitable distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges” through taxation and welfare programs and protects “economic rights” to necessities, such as food, housing, and education (as described by Google Gemini).
My fellow students attribute the state of the world – political division and outrage, increased violence, hunger and poverty – to selfishness. They understand selfishness as no consideration of others or exploitation of them, packaged together with unwillingness to be one’s brothers’ keeper. They also lamented that many countries don’t get along and collaborate and attributed their conflicts to political leaders’ power lust.
What’s wrong with the world is worth pondering if we want to make it better. I found the conversation educational in trying to understand my classmates’ thinking.
The students are convinced that social justice is the only legitimate principle for organizing society. That is hardly surprising, as most of us like to think we are right. But their rejection of the alternative, capitalism, was based on a strawman.
In their strawman version, capitalism is a system of “survival of the fittest” where the strong exploit the weak and the rich exploit the poor, such as greedy capitalists paying subsistence wages to their workers who toil in miserable conditions and selling subpar products to consumers for inflated prices, just to maximize their profits. This strawman capitalism is either an anarchy with no government, or a crony system where the government facilitates companies’ exploitation for kickbacks.
While my fellow students are right to reject an alternative system that is based on coercion (which capitalism is not), they do not question coercion by the government to achieve social justice. In our mixed economy system where some freedom is combined with increasing controls, the government continually initiates coercion. It does so through taxation, to ensure equitable “redistribution” of wealth and through regulations and controls.
Most countries today are mixed economies whose explicit goal is to ensure social justice, yet the world’s problems continue. In my classmates’ view, the solution is more social justice: more taxation of the wealthy and more government controls to reduce inequities. In other words, more socialism and government controls and less capitalism and freedom.
That solution ignores a fundamental fact of human nature: we don’t possess automatic knowledge about how to act to survive and flourish. Unlike other species that have evolved to pursue their survival automatically, we must think to discover the knowledge required and then choose to apply it. Obtaining values we need to survive and thrive requires an independent process of thought, from finding food fit to eat, constructing a simple shelter, building a fire, to creating food supply chains to feed millions, building a power plant, and achieving nuclear fusion. But such thinking cannot be coerced – it requires freedom. It is no accident that the most significant advances in knowledge are made in the freest countries. Freedom is the social requirement of human survival and flourishing.
No automatic knowledge means that we must choose to pursue it and even if we do, we can and do make mistakes in our thinking. The best way to correct mistakes is having many people pursue knowledge and let the best – most consistent with reality – ideas win. That requires freedom (as indicated by the most Nobel prizes in science and medicine being awarded to scientists in the freest countries). And even if knowledge about how humans can survive and flourish is available, not everyone chooses to apply it. But they should be free to make that choice and bear the consequences, as long as they respect others’ right to choose differently.
That’s why I disagree with my fellow students about fixing the world with more coercion and less freedom. Instead, I advocate a social system that leaves people free to think and choose for themselves. It does this by banishing coercion – initiation of physical force. That is capitalism, the only system that makes harmonious human co-existence possible by protecting freedom.
Capitalism, as defined by Ayn Rand, is “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” Rand called capitalism “an unknown ideal” because it’s poorly understood and hasn’t been fully reached anywhere. But all the evidence shows that countries that are the most capitalistic – most free economically – are the most prosperous and flourishing, such as Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, Taiwan, and Luxembourg. These are countries where the government protects freedom by upholding individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) and by punishing those who violate others’ rights by initiating physical force or fraud.
In true capitalism, protection of individual rights is the government’s only role and includes solving disputes through the court system. The government does not initiate force against its citizens or other countries; it uses force only in retaliation against those who do: thieves, fraudsters, other criminals, and foreign invaders. Because the government doesn’t collect taxes, it cannot “re-distribute” wealth and create welfare programs to pursue social justice. (Nor can it engage in cronyism and hand out favors to the highest bidders). People are left free to pursue their own interests, to produce and trade to the best of their abilities. The small minority who are not able to work, will depend on private charity and insurance.
The sorry state of the world today is not due to insufficient social justice – all mixed economies are pursuing it – but the rampant initiation of physical force by governments and individuals, justified by bad ideas, that erodes freedom, creates conflict, and stifles human flourishing. If we want a better world, we need more capitalism, not less.
