Capitalism is utterly fantastic

Capitalism 660

Capitalism pays for all the other -isms.

The misguided people of the left regularly denounce capitalism and those who practice it. They think that individuals should not provide goods and services or own their own stuff, that the state should do all this instead. So lets look at who the nasty fat capitalists are: your hairdresser, corner shop, ethnic takeaway, taxi, window cleaner, publican, market trader, day nursery, etc. The fact is that most capitalist are small and medium sized businesses.

You may have noticed that you don’t live in a cave or hut and that you don’t wear animal skins. Instead you live in a rich society with cars, televisions, computers, overseas holidays, smartphones, double glazing and a million other wonders. All this wealth was created by capitalism, proven as the best way to organise society over thousands of years. And we would all be far wealthier if it wasn’t for the actions of governments, socialists, corporatists, cronies and all the other parasitic evils, who leech off capitalism.

Capitalism. Not government. 650

So what is this capitalism that has done such amazing things to benefit humanity? It is when an individual, often with partners, competes in the market to provide goods and services to other people. Serving their fellow man. In doing so they often employ people and often generate wealth. This wealth generation is called profit, the reward for looking after customers. It is the motivation for people to succeed. And it pays for everything.

Capitalism looting 650

The major feature of capitalism is that ALL the parties benefit EVERY time there is a transaction. This is the opposite of socialism where nobody benefits from many transactions.

Capitalism Friedman 650

Of course capitalism is unequal. Some people are more able than others, some work harder, take more risks, invest their earnings, educate themselves and are more enterprising. Socialism does not like the success that this brings, so they seek to punish it by extorting from those who are successful and rewarding those who fail. Which inevitably means that society as a whole fails, as we have seen every time that socialism is tried.

Capitalim churchill 650

If my neighbour has a yacht, a helicopter and a private jet I am very happy for him. His success does not make me poorer. In fact the opposite is true, his wealth comes from successfully competing in the market to provide goods and services, so he has made society and everyone in it better off. And he has paid immense taxes for the government to waste and squander.

Capitalism requires that some organisations are very big because of the complexity or risk of what they do. It costs over a billion pounds to bring a new drug to market and most drugs make a loss for their developer. This is a business of very high risk which needs very large global companies just to afford to improve our quality of life. A new commercial aircraft model takes many billions of investment and involves tens of thousands of people in its manufacture. Boeing and Airbus have transformed our lives. Supermarkets provide us with many thousands of products, all in perfect condition, at incredibly low prices. These are all amazing organisations who use their economies of scale to look after their customers. So, as you can see, we all benefit from big capitalist organisations.

There are two very nasty things that are definitely NOT capitalism but which uneducated people think are capitalism. And these are cronyism and corporatism.

Cronyism is when the market is ignored and business is done on the basis of favours. Sometimes this can be on a small but pervasive scale, as with much freemasonry. Sometimes it can be on the immense scale of huge defence contracts where there is no competition and just one company gets the business. The Typhoon fighter project for the RAF was originally budgeted to cost £7 billion of our money, the latest figure is £37 billion and that is for fewer aircraft. A fivefold increase in cost. We could have bought, say, F18s for a fraction of the price.

Corporatism is where special interests are allowed to override capitalism. We see this with massive subsidies paid to farmers, with the CPRE forcing us to live in rabbit hutches, with trade unions irresponsibly wielding power and with the trillions being wasted on greenism and the warmist pseudoscientists.

As is very clear to see we would be a huge amount better off if capitalism was allowed to work properly, governments, socialists, corporatists and cronies need to be minimised or eliminated, all four of these make us poorer and reduce our quality of life.

Lefties never learn 650

A brilliant example of capitalism are the German Mittelstand companies, the power houses of their economy. Small and medium sized, family owned and handed down from generation to generation they are highly efficient and very focused with an emphasis on serving markets wherever they are globally and adapting very quickly to change. They employ over 70% of Germany’s private sector workers. In Britain our ridiculous, envy driven, death duties and our malicious trade unions are very powerful mechanics against us creating our own Mittelstand and we are all very much poorer because of this.

Labour Fish

As we head into a general election it is very clear to see that the Conservatives are working very hard to maximise capitalism and the generation of wealth to make us all better off. It is also very clear to see that Labour don’t know where wealth comes from so they have policies that seek to destroy it and make us all worse off. They think that “social justice” means punishing success and rewarding failure. They simply do not understand either economics or the brilliance of capitalism.

hayek-socialists 650

6 Comments


  1. Capitalism is good, but there is also a lot to be said for government spending and investment (why is everyone such an extremist on these issues? Isn’t it obvious that the truth is somewhere in the middle?).

    Quite a lot of scientific and technological innovation has been directly or indirectly the result of government spending. The internet was originally a US Government-funded research project (ARPAnet). The GPS satellite system that all satnavs use is a US Navy project. The recent comet landing and the discovery of the Higgs-Boson were the result of combined public spending in many European countries.

    The moon landings happened when NASA received around 4% of the US government budget. Since it was cut (and then taxes were cut) there’s been no successful space travel beyond low-earth orbit (and most space travel in low-earth orbit has been government-funded).

    There are lots of other examples. Broadly, the market is the best system for incremental product development where the science and engineering has largely been worked out. But for long-term basic research (such as investigating the Higgs-Boson or dark matter) which won’t have a practical application for a long time you don’t find the market really working. Capitalism is not bad but it’s short-term. We don’t want communism, but if we want future progress we need to invest a certain proportion of our GDP via taxation into basic research.

    Reply

  2. That’s all nice and inspiring, but this country uses a blend of socialism and capitalism, for multiple reasons. There are smart people who study this stuff in college for years and years who could explain those reasons better than I can. But my point is, A) leaning left does not necessarily mean you are 100% anti-capitalism. You are mistaken if you think left-leaning means you are completely against the free market. I have no problem admitting that I enjoy good and services that the free market provides. But, what do you do when enormous corporations use their financial influence to essentially purchase the government? What do you do when they gang up together? What do you do when there is a service or good that the public wants or needs, yet the free market cannot provide because it’s not profitable to do so? Are you against public schools? Libraries? Police? Those are technically “socialist” services, because they are funded by the public, and I’m sure you have absolutely no problem using public services each and every day.

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  3. This is self aggrandising, pompous crap. You really think you’re something special. You’re actually rather thick and have a chip on your shoulder about it. You then over compensate by trying to take as much as you can from your fellow humans in an attempt to raise yourself above them because you really know you are intellectually deficient.

    Reply

    1. Hi James,

      Insults to not make valid debate. See how badly you lose, to Baroness Thatcher:

      Reply

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