Capitalism

In 1987, I traveled to California to hear a group of speakers on various subjects within the envelope of the freedom philosophy. It was a rewarding and refreshing experience, with a singular high point: a talk by Dr. Nathaniel Branden, one-time associate of Ayn Rand. Dr. Branden gave an exciting talk about his introduction to Rand's ideas -- by Rand herself -- and most important and memorable for what I'm about to describe.

Apparently, Branden was a "red-diaper baby." His parents, like many of their time, had absorbed socialism at an early age, and had brought up their son in to assume the incontrovertible truth of socialist theory. Then, as a teenager, Branden encountered the first of Rand's world-renowned books, The Fountainhead. As he put it, the book spoke to him in a very personal way, and moved him to establish contact with its author.

Trouble was, the young man didn't have the slightest clue what capitalism was, and his ignorance irritated Rand too much for that early contact to come to anything.

Of course, later in their lives, they did meet. Even though he was considerably older and more mature, Branden was no wiser about economics or the peculiar position of capitalism in the scheme of economic systems. Rand pointed him at a number of books, including Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson and Isabel Paterson's The God Of The Machine, which he proceeded to digest and ponder. Even so, by Branden's own statement, he "still didn't get it."

There came a fateful day when Rand asked him: "Do you believe that man has the right to exist?"

The young man replied, "Why, Miss Rand, of course he does!"

Rand immediately countered, "You do understand, the right to exist means the right to exist for one's own sake?"

Branden replied, "But Miss Rand, of course! If he didn't exist for his own sake, it would mean he was existing by permission!"

Rand nodded and said, "The political implementation of that idea is capitalism."

And Branden said, "Oh!"

"From that beginning," Branden continued, "capitalism, for me, was filled with moral energy.... It was the only economic system fit for human consumption."

Yet, there are millions of Americans who don't understand the very simple principle on which capitalism -- the economics of freedom -- is based! And there is little prospect of reaching and educating enough of them to make a significant difference in this century.

Capitalism, alone in the universe of economic thought, is not a system of command, control, or legally based privilege. It is merely the name for that state of affairs in which no one has the legal privilege of telling anyone else what or how he may produce, trade, or consume. It is the scheme in which each of us exists by right, and for his own sake.

The objections to capitalism have been many and varied, and have arisen from all points of the political compass. It has been called "utopian." It has been said to produce inequality. It stands accused of promoting an atomistic individualism. It creates a cash nexus among men, which supposedly displaces more civilized and humane relations. Every ill of our time, from energy shortages through exploitation of the helpless to pollution of the air and water, has been laid at capitalism's door.

What do the accusers suggest in its place? Why, command and control, of course, though the forms and rules vary from pundit to pundit. Once one rejects the principles and methods of freedom, nothing else is left. But no rationale for why State command and control would be superior to free men making their own decisions in a free market has held up for as much as a single year of experimentation.

Ultimately, the rejection of capitalism is the rejection of all human rights, down to the most basic: the right to life. To propose State control over the free market is to propose that the State, whose sole method for achieving anything is to plant the muzzle of a gun in your ribs and say, "do as we say or we'll kill you," may legitimately kill men for peaceably and honestly pursuing material gain.

The most compact and forceful response to such lunacy has been provided by Miss Rand herself, through the mouth of Francisco d'Anconia, in the last and greatest of her novels, Atlas Shrugged:

"When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out."