The good name of “capitalism” has to be recaptured and restored, just as the good name and concept of “liberalism,” rightly understood, should be returned to the advocates of individual liberty and free enterprise.
Business is for producing and trading material values, driven by the profit motive.
The friends of freedom must remind their fellow citizens that the only fundamental political question in any election is whether or not those running for political office unswervingly declare their allegiance to the philosophy of individual rights to life, liberty and property and its accompanying social system of free market capitalism?
While it is too late to prevent the damage in Fort McMurray now, the solution to minimizing losses from fires in the future is to sell the government forests and let private owners manage them for long-term profitability—by protecting their own property and respecting the property rights of others (through good property management to reduce the fire hazard).
Individual rights include the freedom to use whichever sources of energy people and businesses want, as long as they don’t violate others’ rights.
In my years of teaching ethics to business students, I must have heard it all when it comes to justifying deception and lying in business.
Nothing that Lenin or Stalin implemented in Soviet Russia or Mao in China, for example, was not called for or implied in Marx’s own writings and arguments.
It is estimated that as many as 64 million innocent men, women and children were killed in the Soviet Union in the name of building the socialist workers’ paradise.”
