Capitalism.  Saying the word is like laying down in a bed with freshly washed sheets and snuggling your nose into the sweetly scented pillows.  <sniff>  Ahhh…  Capitalism.  If political institutions are merely a reflection of the economic system which forms their foundation, then any free man must be a capitalist.  Capitalism is the only economic mode which expects liberty and ownership of property to be the order of the day.  It is the cornerstone of a republican governing structure, and the first thing brought to heel by totalitarian despots.

There are two states of existence for man, regardless of station and class.  A man may exist as a free man, or he may exist as a slave.  This is an absolute, not subject to any type of “grey area”.  If a man is not free, he is a slave.  There is no such thing as “90% free”.

What is slavery?

Slavery is a form of forced labour in which people are considered to be the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages).

A slave is thought to be the property of others.  This implies that he is not capable of owning property himself.  As I have stated in other places, the freedom to own property is the primary freedom, the one freedom which makes all other freedoms possible.

Your life is the most valuable thing you own, correct?  You only have so many heartbeats.  Once your heart has beat its last thump, your time on this Earth is over, and you’re off to whatever may await us after death (if anything).  No amount of money can buy you another day, another hour, or another minute when your time to go comes.  This is so well understood by everyone that you’d think it doesn’t need repeating, but many people do not carry that thought out past the certainty of death and the impossibility of you to forestall it when it comes.   They fail to realize that all value stems from the existence of death.  Things are only precious because you will someday lose them.

What does the limited quantity and irreplaceability of seconds of your life mean?  It means that your life is the ultimate store of value to you.  Nothing is more precious than your life.  Your life, the time over which it extends, makes up your inherent value as a person.

You, as an animal, require the basic needs of existence for any animal to be met for continued existence.  You require food, water, and shelter.  How are these things provided?  By the spending of the only thing of value which you possess: your life.  Hunter-gatherers used to spend their lives toiling for food, wandering around looking for water, and trying to build shelters from plants and hides.  This was time which they could not get back, thus even nature’s bounty to them was not free.  Nature charges for survival.

Today we are not as reliant upon nature and chance as our ancestors were.  We have easy access to the basic essentials of life.  But how do we go about obtaining them?  In the exact same manner, we trade our lives for them.  When you go to work, when you punch the clock, you are doing what?

You are giving up your freedoms.  You are giving up your ability to lead your life, finite and precious, to do as ordered, in exchange for a paycheck.  A wage is the price of your labor, the monetary storehouse of what you and the employer determine to be the value of your life and time spent at work.  It is the means by which we convert our most valuable possession from a unit-less thing to a material value, measurable and portable.  We are then able to use this physical representation of our life to purchase the goods and services required for continued existence.

This is the foundation of capitalism.  That we are free to trade our lives (through employment) in exchange for money in the form of a wage (keep in mind that this is the price of your labor), and then free to decide how best to spend that money to advance what is left of our lives.  Capitalism requires the freedom of an individual to own his life, his property, and the ability to choose how he will spend them in the advancement of his goals.

Contrast this with other economic models.

In a socialist/communist/Progressive government system, the government owns all property, on behalf of society as a whole, and is responsible for making sure every individual gets their slice of the total economic pie (the last part is a theory, of course. The only real part of that statement is the belief of the government that it owns everything). Thus, all that you own, or can ever own, is merely allowed to you by the state, or society, as a whole. The government decides who gets paid what, where they may live, what they may purchase with the money they received from the exchange of their finite life, through work for wages.  This is not much different than the slaves who worked southern plantations way back in the day. 

They were provided homes, food, “security”, all for a measly 100% tax rate!  Of course, the same holds true for slavery as does those who exist in non-capitalist economic systems.  Yes, they were provided homes, but of far less quality than those of their masters.  Yes, they were provided food, but it was the dregs of the year’s harvest.  Yes, they were provided security, but only in the sense that murder of them was an economic attack on their master, akin to theft.  They were never allowed to excel because all surplus generated by efficient and productive use of their finite, precious life was immediately taken by their master.

A look at communist/socialist regimes the world over illustrates this same truth.  From bread lines in Russia to Cubans setting sail for the US on a lashed together pile of floating garbage, we understand that life under “Progressive” rule is far from the rosy picture the Marxist retards would have us to believe.  Under a government command and control economy, we get the barest minimums on which to survive, and then have to sing psalms of thanks to the benevolent government from which these things come, and only lightly drives us with the whip when they aren’t coming fast enough…

Proof?  Examine the words of a known “Progressive”, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, as she discusses taking excessive profits from oil companies for her own uses: 

Hillary Clinton on Taking Oil Companies Profits 

“The Democrats know what needs to be done.  And we’re working to try to push this agenda forward.  Now the other day, the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world.  I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund…” [emphasis added by me — MM]

Sounds much like a slave driver discussing taking the excess production from the slaves working the fields, doesn’t it?  “This year, my slaves gathered enough cotton to make this the highest yielding year in my lifetime.  I want to take that cotton and I want to put it into…”

How free does this make the oil companies?  Don’t they exist, in Hillary’s mind, specifically for the purposes of funding her agenda, of making her goals and dreams come true?  This woman has no respect for property, for freedom.  To her, the government she helps head is the sole owner of everything!  No, this isn’t “progressive”, but regressive!  This woman wants to assume the power of a monarch, and force each of us to serve her will.  Her strategy is profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, and pro-slavery and bondage.

Examine the idea of property in America.  You may work your whole life, save, and purchase a home and some land.  But what happens if you don’t pay your property taxes?  The Federal Government comes, armed, and takes your property from you.  It then takes your liberties from you by casting you into prison.  If you resist, the agents of the government are empowered to kill you for your temerity.

Now you’re faced with a real dilemma: Do you own your property, or do you rent it from the government?  Do you own your life, do you have real freedom, or is your freedom dependent upon meeting quotas of acceptable taxable income for the government slave drivers?  Chew on it for awhile.  It’s a really libertarian thing to ponder.

If your life is not yours, how can your thoughts be yours? How can your speech be yours? Your religion? The freedom to keep the rewards of your labor, and to spend or save them as you see fit, are the only freedoms which truly matter, all other alternatives to this approach mean that you live in the service of another, for whims and desires not your own, much like how Hillary would like to subject the oil companies to forced slavery to further her own, selfish desires.

But I did not intend for this piece to devolve into a diatribe against the evils of government.  Hillary accomplishes that task much more efficiently as a living, breathing illustration than do my writings.  I was examining capitalist thought.  Let us move into another facet of the capitalist way.

What is another difference between capitalism and a government command and control economy, such as that described by Marx?  Value theory.

Marxism, indeed all statist thought, details the idea that all things have a social value.  That the value of labor is magnified by the cost of their labor being devoted to one specific thing, and not to another.  While this is part of the equation, Marx was a thickheaded numbskull, and all of his followers are the same.  With Marx, all value was measured in terms of labor, and he believed that the capitalists were evil because they did not contribute labor to the production of goods and services, but he saw it as capitalists taking value from the hard working laborers, in a sort of class theft.

But here is where Marx went horribly wrong: There is no such thing as social value!  All value is subjective.  It depends upon the individual purchasing a good or service and their desire to have it.  This is the reason auctions work.

In an auction, an item may sell for much higher than its normal market value because of the desire of the bidder to have the item.  Maybe they are bid up because they don’t want someone else to have the good, maybe they pay more for an object because of some innate compulsion to buy certain styles of blue widgets, who knows?  What we do know is that value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, not in the eyes of society.

The idea of social value is what leads Marxist style command and control economies to set pay rates.  In Russia, if you were a plumber, you would get paid a plumber’s wage, set by the government’s opinion on the value of your work to society as a whole.  Any other plumber was entitled to get the same wage as you, for their work was just as valuable to society as a whole as yours was.

But there is a logical disconnect here.  It may be best explained through a parable, one which demonstrates the folly of social value and equal pay for equal work, fundamentals of command and control economies.

I am a single parent to a 5 year old daughter.  While I am overly proud of my child, and think of her as the greatest thing to ever walk the Earth, I understand the limitations she has imposed upon her by virtue of her age and lack of experience.

Let’s say I have flour, eggs, butter, sugar, cream, all the raw ingredients required to make a cake.  I give them to my daughter, and she toils for hours and hours making a cake.  The result, while we could call it a “cake”, isn’t likely to be edible.  Thus, society has lost value.  The value of the raw ingredients before she started messing with them was higher than that of the finished, inedible product.  This refutes the Marxist idea that labor is the source of value.  Labor can just as easily destroy value as it can increase it.

But, if we were to take those ingredients and give them to a master chef, he could produce a product much, much more valuable than the raw ingredients themselves.  This puts the lie to the Marxist ideal of equal work for equal pay.  Both my daughter and the chef produced something intended to be a cake, but where my daughter reduced the overall value of the equation, the chef increased it.  Why shouldn’t the chef be entitled to more money for performing the same task?

This is where Marx deceived so many people.  He helped create the idea that a wage is more than simply the price of your labor, governed by the same laws of supply and demand that govern all other products.  If you provide an inferior product, why should you expect it to cost as much as a high quality product?  Why should my child get the same price for her labor, producing the baker’s equivalent of Ford Taurus, as the chef, producing the equivalent of an Aston-Martin?

Even given the superiority of the chef’s work compared to my daughter’s work, which product do you think I, as the father, will value more?  If you could see the front of my fridge, covered with “art” my daughter has produced and not examples of those produced by Picasso, Da Vinci, or Michelangelo, you’d have no problem telling me the answer.  I value the work of my daughter, despite its inferiority, to that of the world’s greatest artists.  This puts the lie to the Marxist idea that value is social in nature, and reaffirms the idea that value is subjective.  I care nothing for the works produced by now rotten corpses, but highly value the scribblings of my daughter.

Now, look at it from the capitalist’s viewpoint.  The capitalist has a pile of raw materials that can be used to make a product.  The capitalist hires workers to labor on its production, but he, not the worker, assumes the risk of the worker turning out inferior products like my five year old’s cake.  The workers may very well reduce the overall value of the raw materials through inept labor.  They may produce very high quality work as well, but this is not known at the outset by the investor.  Why shouldn’t the investor be compensated for that risk?  He’s rolling the dice on the ability of the worker, his investment is a vote of confidence in the ability of the worker, he incurs any loss, why shouldn’t he, for all of that, be entitled to a level of profit?  Reward for his risk.

 What does this idea that worker’s efforts, and their produce, are not equal mean?  Competition!  Competition on the part of employers to get the highest quality help.  Competition on the part of workers to prove their value and secure their jobs.  This is essential to the success of the capitalist system in terms of raising the standard of living, not just in the countries which practice it, but the world over.

We’re products of an evolutionary system of natural selection, where in the fit survive and pass on their genes, and the unfit do not.  We’re hardwired to compete for survival, same as every other creature on Earth. Competition is a vital part of our psyche, it is reflected in everything humans do. And why shouldn’t it be? We didn’t reach the top of the food chain by being pacifists and more concerned with the “other guy”, or species, in this case.

There is no dumber system of laws, made by men, than those seeking to regulate the natural and normal inclinations of the human animal by removing competition from the reality of day to day existence. You may not be able to keep score at a Little League game these days, but the kids are still fully aware of who won and who lost. There is no other rational reason for playing the game, right?  No point in even being out there but to play, and to win.

Any system that doesn’t take into account our basic natures as the foundation for laws and societal norms is doomed to fail. It can’t have any chance to succeed if it, from its inception, is designed to work against our nature and instincts. (Thank you Mr. Robert A. Heinlein, I’ve been pondering that thought for years.)  This explains why even the partial capitalism America has employed over the last 200 years hasn’t failed us, but the USSR and Cuba have stagnated and have gone/are going the way of the dodo.  It explains why China only became a viable world power after Deng Xiaoping and the idea of capitalist “free zones” and a “socialist free market (?)”.  A societal structure that has as its goal the advancement and improvement of the lives of the people whom live under it must conform to the inherent nature of the people being governed.

 Thus, we as libertarians must ask: How best to establish a government, built upon the rock of capitalism?

I prefer a government that resembles the game Monopoly(TM).  Allow me to explain my analogy.

I think of the game of Monopoly(TM) as a metaphor for capitalism, indeed, if you think about it, that’s what it was designed to be, a board game that captured the essence of the rags-to-riches possibility that the capitalist system produces during the Great Depression.  Personally, I hold to the opinion that the world works under the premise that “Life is a game and money is how men keep score.”  With that in mind, please examine what you have when you look at the game, allowing for difference in such versions as “Star Wars Monopoly (TM)” and “Simpson”s Monopoly(TM)”.

You have a playing field that is divided up into a bunch of different property, of varying amounts.  There are physical items representing your venture capitalist, most of you probably have a favorite avatar (mine is the shoe), which you maneuver around the board with the intent of buying up all of the property, if you’re able, and avoiding serious jail time.

This represents the free market.  A place where, with a combination of luck and sound strategy, you’re able to create outcomes that advance you far, in terms of wealth, power, and influence, from the place where you start.  This has been the game’s appeal, the reason people sit down to play it.  The real purpose of the whole kit and caboodle is to play the game, and from there, to win.  It’s the old engineer’s motto, “form follows function”.  Playing the game is the purpose, the reason, behind the entire package.

A game must have rules.  The game must have rules because there would be no game without them.  Rules define the game.  A very important point to keep in mind.  Goals are also rules.  They direct your actions.  They determine when the game is over, and who the winners and losers are. 

Monopoly(TM) and the free market are both subjected to rules, as well.  In Monopoly(TM), the rules are written out and come with the package, sometimes in a booklet, sometimes printed on the inside of the box.  In the real world, “America version” of Monopoly(TM), the ‘according to Hoyle’ (ahem) rules are written in the US Constitution, and the other varying laws which our courts have established in a loose sort of ‘house rules’ for our particular game.

It’s kind of amusing to think of Constitutional Amendments as the legal equivalent of the “pot” that pays you out when you hit free parking…

The rules of the market help determine who the winners will be, who the losers will be (and yes, losing is a normal, natural risk of existence and participation).  The rules are the same for everyone.  See a need, fill a need, and the more you’re efficient and responsive to the change of needs, the more you will succeed.  If you break the law, you get sent to jail.  The rules describe the ending of the game, when one player has a monopoly.  They state the game is over, time to reset, which is what the government anti-trust and monopoly powers aim to do.  So on and so forth.

And surrounding it all, but interfering in no manner, is the cardboard box.  The government.  It exists solely to 1) give the game a unifying identity, a place to store everything in relative safety, and 2) keep other pieces from other games from getting in and taking your property and money by force. 

Always gotta watch out for that Risk(TM) game…

The main point is that the game, capitalism and the free markets, is the singular purpose of why we’re banded together into civilization in the first place.  We are drawn together because of trade.  The box in no way, shape, form, nor fashion should interfere with the game, that is not the box’s purpose.  In all actuality, if the box did interfere with the play of the game, it would become a liability to the game.

For example, in America you might hear:

“Banker!  I need $200 for passing Go!”

“Hold on a second” <bumble, stumble, muttering> “Ugh, I’m getting hassled and tied up by the box!”

Or, you could imagine the Marxist nightmare…  The box actually shoots you and starts playing the game all by itself.  Did you ever see a box toss dice into itself?  Can you imagine the difficulty of getting the box to kill itself later and let you have the game back?

No, form follows function, and the function of society and civilization is bring people together for the purposes of trade.  That is the game.  We want to minimize distractions from the game, and let people just get down to playing it.  That is the capitalist belief.

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Tags: environment & nature, money, politics & government // Comments Off on One guy’s thoughts on libertarianism Pt.3