The ignorance of people like Sam, in this day and age, astounds me. There is now no excuse to be so willfully oblivious to the objective facts of history.
The question of whether or not capitalism has been a success is not conjecture, it is the empirical truth. No other force in human history has done more to raise general living standards. As an illustration, consider that in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, average life expectancies barely rose at all. For thousands of years, the average human lived until the age of 25 or 30. In two hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, the average life expectancy of people in free capitalist countries more than doubled. This is without a shadow of a doubt the single greatest achievement of mankind so far.
We can make similar illustrations by looking at things like infant/child mortality rates. Capitalism slashed them to a tiny fraction of their former selves. In Britain before the Industrial Revolution, children were very lucky to live past ten years of age. Those who lived that long were extremely unlikely to experience a full stomach, even once. Children roamed the streets – they were filthy and diseased, they were thieves, vagabonds, child prostitutes. This was the “norm.”
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, these children had for the first time the opportunity to work in order that they may eat and survive. The fact of child labor in those days is not the stinging indictment of the “inhumanity” of capitalism the left claims it is. History is not a series of snapshots to be judged by today’s standards – it is a movie with a direction. When kids worked in factories, it was an *improvement* to their lives, not an atrocity.
In the early days of industry, technology was crude such that the productivity of one individual was very small. Since wage levels are and can only be determined by individual productivity, this meant that the kind of wages which could be earned in those days were very small. This is why parents had their kids work in factories. Their own wages were not enough to support the entire family. With their kids working too, they had for the first time in their lives a decent chance of survival. It is not a matter of chance that the birth of the Industrial Revolution coincided with the most significant population explosion in human history. People were having families that (shock, horror) *lived*. To denounce this process is to denounce human life.
Wage levels were able to increase not as a result of unions, or campaigners, but as a result of innovation in the means of production. Since wages come from revenue, the only way to increase them is to increase revenue. The only ways to increase revenue are to increase productivity, or increase consumer prices. The latter neutralizes the value of wages, so it can be seen that advances in productivity are the only possible way to increase wages. The left has always wrongly believed that wage increases are the result of socialists forcing greedy capitalists to give up more of their profits – this idea betrays the most fundamental ignorance of economics imaginable.
That capitalism has done more to improve our living standards than anything else in history is indisputable. That the left would have made it their business to do everything they could to attack and sabotage the process is disgraceful, but not surprising. They don’t see human life as the standard of value. Their ideological fantasies come first to them – and if human life improves by means of a different ideology, then human life be damned. For proof, observe the rivers of blood which flowed in the name of Marxism – and the left’s stubborn insistence that such a philosophy is more “human” than capitalism.
I would now like to take this opportunity to address the issue of capitalism and African Americans. The ignorant simpleton “Sam” asks, what has capitalism every done for black people – and why should they not support socialism?
The short answer is: capitalism freed black people from their chains – and socialism is nothing more than state slavery.
In case you weren’t aware, slavery was not a British or an American institution – it was a *human* institution which was the norm for thousands of years. Before the white man ever set foot upon Africa, the African slave trade flourished for at least two thousand years. Tribes like the Ashanti and many others roamed the continent, attacked villages and enslaved men and boys, mainly for sale to the Middle East. The African trade in humans was not a trivial matter of “indentured servitude” as many Afrocentric “scholars” will claim – it ran the full spectrum of slavery from indentured servitude to enforced labor all the way up to child sacrifice. Men and boys were frequently castrated before their passage to the Middle East – most died in the process. Unlike American slaves, they weren’t permitted to raise families.
So then the white man bought slaves from the African traders, too. This was a shameful part of our history and should never, ever be justified or trivialized. But neither should the truth be suppressed: Britain and America practiced slavery for the shortest period of anyone else who practiced it – and they quickly realized that it was a practice that should be ended. The British and American governments mobilized their entire navies, at tremendous cost to themselves, in order that the world slave trade be stopped. In this, they were incredibly successful. Nobody has done more in history to eradicate slavery. They set up colonies for freed slaves in Africa – Liberia, for instance – and their greatest opposition came from Africans who made their living from slavery and who frequently attacked the colonies and re-enslaved innocent Africans.
But where does capitalism come into all of this? Well, the rise of the Industrial Revolution quickly meant that slave labor, as a means of production, was made obsolete. Slavery was never an efficient means of production. Unpaid slaves will only ever do the minimum necessary to prevent being whipped. There is only so much you can physically beat a human being before you make them unable to work anyway. Not only that, in terms of a cost of production, slaves are very expensive and you have to feed and clothe them. The advent of factories and machines meant a more efficient means of production and to hire free individuals on a wage was cheaper than buying slaves, who had high maintenance costs and were not inspired to work to any high standard.
The progress of African Americans in a country in which they started as slaves was never going to be an overnight affair. Nobody is denying that blacks in America haven’t had a rough time – of course they have. But capitalism has done more to improve their standards of living than anything else. Certainly, even poor blacks in America have access to higher living standards than do their counterparts anywhere else in the world.
Up until the 60′s, even with the reality of racism and segregation, African Americans were on the right track. At that time, blacks had extremely strong family values, a huge willingness to become educated (after being denied the privilege for so long), a very strong work ethic and relatively low crime rates. So what happened? I’ll tell you: socialist radicalism happened. Cue the late 60′s, cue the 70′s. The scourges of Marx-inspired black separatism ravaged the African American landscape and took few prisoners. Aided and abetted by demented white leftist radicals, the likes of Huey Newton and Elaine Brown sowed the seeds of a cult of destruction and failure which continues in the ghettos to this day. Rational human goals like learning marketable skills and pursuing a career were shunned as “acting white” – the only “authentic” way for blacks to behave, according to this ideology, was to reject all “white” values and to limit education to things like Afrocentric history and the politics of racial identity. Do I even need to point out that the introduction of this left wing culture into the psyche of black America, along with the proliferation of leftist liberal social policy, perfectly coincides with the rise in illegitimate births, the breakup of the family unit, drug abuse, violent crime, murder, academic failure, mass unemployment, alienation and despondency? The connection is there to see for anyone with two ears, two ears and a brain capable of integrating perceptions into a rational hierarchy of concepts.
Socialism is a crude form of tribalism in which the individual is enslaved to the collective. It is the antithesis of individual freedom and as such, support of it among black Americans is both ironic and tragic.
Capitalism has done more for blacks in America than anything else. More than a thousand Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons or Louis Farrakhans. Reagan perhaps did more than any other President in history to improve the financial situation of African Americans. During his Presidency, blacks enjoyed higher entry to the middle classes, higher gains in wages and higher rises in the revenues of black businesses than under any other administration. More blacks were taken out of poverty during the Reagan years than any others. Black poverty rose under Carter and fell under Reagan. That’s all you need to know.
The reason why the left’s call for “unity” and blind agreement from the right will never work is because right and left operate on such a fundamentally different set of premises that agreement for the sake of unity necessitates a betrayal of fundamental principles and thus requires that the right winger discard his or her own integrity. The trouble is that the left sees anyone who disagrees with them as “mean” or “evil.” After all, what kind of “monster” could possibly disagree with socialized health care? The answer lies in the fact that there is more to the issue, there is ALWAYS more to the issue than simply “caring.” There is the belief that a greater standard of well being will be achieved not by state dependence but by individual responsibility. It’s not that the right “cares less” about the well being of humans, it’s just that they have fundamental agreements on the best way to achieve those goals.
The trouble with the left is that they are notoriously reluctant to expose themselves to the arguments behind the ideology of “the other side.” As an example, of all the pro-capitalist right wing/libertarian types that I know and am acquainted with, most have at some time or another sat down and tackled the literature of the left – they’ve read Das Kapital, the Communist Manifesto, they’ve been exposed to pro-socialist and pro-Marxist arguments from their college professors, they’ve endured a lifetime of immersion in a popular culture and a media which promotes this ideology endlessly. But few and far between are the leftists who have sat down and studied the finer points of Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt or Rand. What opinions they do hold have come to them not from reading “The Road to Serfdom” or “Capitalism – the Unknown Ideal” but instead have come to them third or fourth-hand via academics (many of whom themselves have come to pick up opinions in this way without reading the books) and articles and blogs. Much of their objection comes in the form of emotive pleas: “Oh *come on*! You don’t really *believe* that nonsense do you?”
I’ve watched Democrats talk about the Auto bailout on TV recently. They refuse to consider the most basic of unavoidable facts – like the issue of unionized labor costs, which cripple the industry. Their answer is invariable “Let’s not blame the workers. The workers just want what’s best for their families, let’s not make them a scapegoat here, when the real issue is…blah blah greed, blah blah health care…blah blah…”
It’s this devotion to blind, emotive ideology in full defiance of and evasion from basic facts, which means that I can never succumb to the leftist mode of thinking just for the sake of “unity.” Other posters here are right: unity be damned. If I went along with the socialistic claptrap of the left, I would lose my self esteem and integrity. NEVER compromise your principles to those who have made no attempt to understand them. NEVER.
