The Capitalist’s Imaginary Line
If you read my last article, “Education Isn’t Everything,” you know I’m a capitalist. Right?
Well, not exactly. Yes, I am convinced that a nation with capitalist policies does dramatically better, economically, than one with socialist (or otherwise very non-capitalist) policies. But that’s not the same thing as a capitalist. Not exactly.
Free-market capitalists are people who have an imaginary dividing line in their heads that separates “legitimately existing problems that capitalism deals with best, and socialism fails to deal with very well at all” and “illegitimate obstacles to the formation and maintenance of a free market.” Their whole way of viewing the world is based on the quasi-religious belief that this line is not only real, but important in the moral sense.
legitimate problems
illegitimate problems
Some people are born with low math capability, and won’t be able to do work that requires it.
Some people are born with low economics capability, and won’t be able to understand why voting for socialist policies hurts their prosperity.
Some people don’t want to go to work every day, because it’s easier not to.
Some people don’t want to vote for free-market candidates, even though they know they would be financially better-off under those candidates.
Some people want to kill others for profit, and hope nobody catches them.
Some people want to kill others as their last act, and don’t give a hoot if everyone knows they did it.
Free-market capitalists spend their whole lives revelling in the knowledge of how great life would be, how advanced human society would become, if the “illegitimate” problems could be waved away with a magic wand, leaving capitalism as the solution to the “legitimate” ones. But if such a wand existed, we would just wave all the problems away, and would have no need of an imperfect solution like capitalism.
Of course, there’s no magic wand. We have to come up with real, workable solutions to every one of these problems. And if they can’t all be solved at the same time, then we have to find the best balance of solving some and not completely solving others.
That’s why I’m not a capitalist. I hear very compelling arguments from capitalists that the best solution to the “legitimate” problems is free-market capitalism. I hear nothing but wishful thinking or flat-out dismissal from the capitalists about how to handle the “illegitimate” problems. Nothing in the capitalist platform even suggests that the free market can achieve the best balance of solutions to all the problems, irrespective of which side of the imaginary dividing line they occupy.
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