121 – Case for Capitalism

Every good thing gets counterfeited and exploited. The devil’s greatest game is to convince people that he is Jesus—that wicked men might ease their guilty consciences and that good men would blame Jesus for the devil’s mischief. So it is with economics.

Populist ideals are no way to devise a working economic strategy.

Socialism is proven by repeating history to be the populism of economics, mainly because it is a pioneering financial philosophy trumpeted by those who were neither financiers nor pioneers. The first known experiment in Socialism arrived with the Pilgrims of 1620, imposed by aristocratic European investors upon the pioneering Pilgrims who abandoned Socialism in order to save their starving people. As if one failure were not enough, Socialism became one evil exchanged for another when the impoverished masses overthrew the heartless aristocrats of Russia, again ending with the same failure where basic needs are always in short supply. Socialism is history’s most predictably repeating failure. Even today, some theoretician seeks to establish an experimental commune with compelling theory as evidence, presenting none of history’s everlasting failures to learn from.

The Pilgrims finally escaped Socialist starvation and a dying population when everyone’s survival became no one’s responsibility but his own. Everyone “rose to the occasion”; the colony had a surplus of goods for the first time and was finally able to pay back its aristocratic investors only by breaking their Socialist bylaws. When Governor Bradford settled with those investors, the deaths of more than half of the colonists at the hands of their Socialist bylaws surely came up in the negotiation.

Early America was founded on this new experiment—that individuals are responsible for their own work ethic and their own corresponding results. Neither aristocracy nor investors nor society have any right to claim the credit for another’s hard-earned labors. Each one is a steward of one’s own capital—one’s own property. That self-responsible, self-reliant, freedom-based economic philosophy founded the Northers colonies that defeated Southern slavery two centuries later. It was called “Capitalism”. Ever since, disenfranchised aristocrats have sought to commandeer the very Capitalism that defeated them while Socialists blame true Capitalists for the evil deeds of aristocrats who are anything but.