Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

The animus and in fact ignorance about what is 'capitalism', is broad and deep. Socialized education, statist-media, pop anti-culture and platitude-mouthing politicians will have that effect on the culture at large. The hypocrisy is also clear. Most people aspire to wealth or at least comfort. Yet many will spew their Marxist drivel out of the other side of their mouth, especially as it relates to entitlements, their 'human rights', or the magic of cheques appearing from the government in the mailbox.

This book is a superb volume on debunking the myths around capitalism. Many of the contributing authors are third-world economists and politicians, who see the salvation of their societies through the application of the structures of capitalism. The system of capital formation and deployment is of course an entire program encompassing morality, laws, regulations, fairness and money. Capitalism has been the only 'fair', 'just' and 'equal' theology of the politcal-economic order devised in history.

“...As the historian Joyce Appleby noted in her recent study The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, “Because capitalism is a cultural system and not simply an economic one, it cannot be explained by mate rial factors alone.” Capitalism is a system of cultural, spiritual, and ethical values. As the economists David Schwab and Elinor Ostrom noted in a seminal game-theoretic study of the role of norms and rules in maintaining open economies, free markets rest firmly on the norms that constrain us from stealing and that are “trust enhancing.” Far from being an amoral arena for the clash of interests, as capitalism is often portrayed by those who seek to undermine or destroy it, capitalist interaction is highly structured by ethical norms and rules.

The entire ethos of capitalism is based on fairness for value. If you are Apple, you can sell your iPad for $600 each, because the market perceives the functional quality and utility of the device to be worth that amount of money. If Apple generates hundreds of millions in profits from the production of the iPad, is that immoral ? Or is it a consequence of satiating a demand with a good product ? If 'profit' becomes immoral, why bother to build the iPad, if the government for example can go to Apple and in the name of 'social justice' plunder its profits for the benefit of vote-buying, redistribution and crony-fascism?

“Capitalism is a source of value. It’s the most amazing vehicle for social cooperation that has ever existed. And that’s the story we need to tell. We need to change the narrative. From an ethical standpoint, we need to change the narrative of capitalism, to show that it’s about creating shared value, not for the few, but for everyone.”

Capitalism is about a fair exchange based on value. The utility of a product or service is the perceived value it offers to a market. It has nothing to do with government contracts, crony-fascism, 'back room deals', ripping people off, or clubbing the poor to death with a wad of thousand dollar notes. In fact the entire welfare system would collapse over night without the jobs, charity and taxes created and paid by 'capitalists'. Capitalism is thus the only 'fair' system to exist. Socialism, Marxism, National Socialism or Fascism, or any other variant of communal-governance is a system of plunder, coercion and fraud. Only a system based on voluntary exchange is moral:

“Critics of markets often complain that capitalism encourages and rewards self-interest. In fact, people are self-interested under any political system. Markets channel their self-interest in socially beneficent directions. In a free market, people achieve their own purposes by finding out what others want and trying to offer it.”

Force is replaced with rational innovation.

Modern Marxists, resplendent in their mental deformity, accuse 'globalization' of making life 'worse' for the human, or in the case of the death cult of globaloneywarming, even destroying our earth goddess Gaia. The first complaint ignores the reality that 600 million Indians and Chinese have been lifted out of poverty thanks to trade, and that more than 20 million 'old' jobs in the 'West' have been replaced by newer industries and technologies in the past 30 years. The second objection is particularly stupid. Humans scrape an existence on top of Gaia's crust. The deepest mine is a mere ½ mile deep. The earth's crust is 3-10 miles in depth. The entire planet is massive and the human is barely scratching and scraping on the top of it. 95 % of Co2 comes from the earth goddess, 5 % or less from man. The death cult of globaloneywarming, not based on science, but force and coercion, wants to deconstruct capital, trade, and job creation, and return the world to the state of modern sub-Saharan Africa. Marxists posit that such an immoral stupidity is 'sophisticated'. It sounds neolithic and awfully irrational.

Marxism in any form, including that of globaloneywarming, or the UN desire for world governance, would impoverish and murder hundreds of millions of people. Poverty is only alleviated by capitalism. It is not solutioned by government [massive bureaucracies eat up much of the 'poor money' in any tax transfer system]. The only way to save the 'poor' is to give them skills and a job:

According to the Institute for International Economics, more than one hundred and fifteen thousand higher-paying computer software jobs were created in 1999–2003, while seventy thousand jobs were eliminated due to outsourcing. Similarly in the service sector twelve million new jobs were being created while ten million old jobs were being replaced. This phenomenon of rapid technological change and the replacement of old jobs with new ones is what economic development is all about.

Dynamic change, market creation, jobs and opportunities only arise from a system of capital investment. In this vein, trade, globalization, and extended linkages are normal, necessary and fundamental to helping the poor [5-10 % of the population in reality], and the rest of us.

“Globalization is not new. It is a modern word describing an ancient human movement, a word for mankind’s search for betterment through exchange and the worldwide expansion of specialization. It is a peaceful word. In the wise pronouncement of the great French economist Frederic Bastiat, if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”

Marxist revolutionries prefer violence and state power to individualism, capital and trade exchange. Socialists-Fascists and Communists hate the individual and have little time for the complications of choice, free-will and private economic development. Communal theologies from Islam to Fascism have murdered more than 400 million humans. Yet they are never blamed for this carnage. The media, educational systems and politicians will even pronounce that wars started by these communal Fascisms are usually the fault of markets, Jews, greedy industrialists, or weapons makers who have bought politicians causing the war. Human insanity knows no limits.

“In July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, revolutionary republican, radical democrat and driving force behind the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France, during which some 40,000 French men and women died on the guillotine as “enemies of the nation,” was put to death by his political opponents. Moments before his death, he addressed the mob that used to adulate him but now was baying for his blood, with the following words: “I gave you freedom; now you want bread as well.” And with that ended the Reign of Terror. The moral we can draw from this is that while there may be a link between political freedom and economic well-being, they are not the same thing.”

 Yes Robespierre, people do enjoy food, and not coercive repressive atheist-secular madness.

The rhetoric around socialist madness does not comport itself to reality. In fact, a common claim against capitalism is that those businesses close to the government 'win'. This is of course the opposite of capitalism. Capitalist systems do not deal in the buying of political preference. This is because in a capitalist system, the government, the state and its ability to squander money is limited.

“Such corrupt cronyism shouldn’t be confused with “free-market capitalism,” which refers to a system of production and exchange that is based on the rule of law, on equality of rights for all, on the freedom to choose, on the freedom to trade, on the freedom to innovate, on the guiding discipline of profits and losses, and on the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labors, of one’s savings, of one’s investments, without fearing confiscation or restriction from those who have invested, not in production of wealth, but in political power.”

Capitalism has nothing whatsoever to do with socialist kickbacks, graft and vote-buying. GM for example is not a product of the capitalist economy, but a bankrupted [still owing $30 billion to the state], union-gifted socialist entity.

 This book is a great read on why Capitalism works, what it means, and how it will help everyone, including that obsessive concern of politicians, themselves who are mostly wealthy, named 'the poor'.