I believe that every argument should begin with commonly understood definitions. Capitalism is a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and voluntary contracts. Communism is the abolition of private property altogether. And socialism is institutionalized aggression against private property and contracts between consenting adults.
Every short-coming of capitalism applies many times over to socialism since the latter does not legally recognize people’s right to voluntarily defund or disassociate with unproductive actors in society.
Under capitalism, no one can take a penny out of your pocket or get a second of your time unless you voluntarily give it to them. But under socialism, the state (or council or committee) has the monopolistic privilege to coercively fund certain activities via taxation, which means the right to threaten people with prison if they don’t chip in. What makes capitalism unique is the right to engage in the original appropriation (using unclaimed scarce resources) and contracting with others (employees and employers).
The Venn Diagram above literally blames all shortcomings of the human race on the right of adults to engage in mutually beneficial contracts. Let’s go one by one.
Is everyone equal under socialism? Senator Bernie Sanders, Hugo Chavez, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jung Un, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jim Jones—all of these people are very unequal in social power and monetary wealth to others. Even if all wealth were equally distributed tonight, within one minute some people would save, others would invest, others would spend on prostitutes, others would buy concert tickets, others would buy food, and we’d be unequal after one minute. All humans are unique, meaning that whenever we try to achieve a certain goal, some people are better organizers and communicators than others; a hierarchy is immediately established whenever human beings exist in isolation or when they cooperate. Capitalism allows us to trade with people who specialize in what they are good at, making everyone better off than they otherwise would be. Socialists promote egalitarianism since it’s unachievable, making it the perfect excuse to grow the state. “Oh not everyone is equal still? Guess the government needs more money and power!”
There is a correlation between clean environments and capitalist economies for a reason. More freedom leads to more investment and social cooperation, leading to more innovation, leading to cleaner alternatives available to the masses. The profit incentive encourages organizations to economize on the resources they consume, which is why cell phones, televisions, computers, and thumb drives have increased in quality while falling in price, while using less and less resources. Consider a cell phone, television, or computer in 1980 and compare it to what is available to the average person in a capitalist country today. They all use far fewer resources, are almost completely privatized, have increased in quality, and decreased in price.
Socialists claim the right to confiscate between 40% and 100% of your income and property, and fear others might acquire property unjustly under capitalism. The very nature of socialism is rejecting private property rights; the very nature of “colonialism” is taking that which you did not acquire via voluntary exchange or original appropriation (being the first user of an unclaimed resource).
I guess it’s super immoral for tyrants far away to impose their will on you a little, but when socialists claim the right to control all aspects of your commercial and social life, then domestic imperialism is totally different. Socialists are imperialists coercively imposing their will on you while forcing you to fund inadequate schools then denying you school choice. The fact that they live in “your country” and are not “a foreign imperialist country” is equivalent to saying “It’s wrong to sexually harass people if they don’t live near you, but if someone lives near you, rape is justifiable if it’s done via the democratic process.”
George Wallace was a famous racist in America some time ago. He claimed that coercive state segregation was a necessary regulation for the betterment of the country (sound familiar?). He rejected people’s right to voluntarily associate, claiming that in segregated Alabama they don’t have the horrible, dangerous riots that desegregated areas suffered from. And he said that blacks suffered from desegregation since they could get easily exploited by a higher IQ population if they mixed, the very same reason socialists give for why employees, consumers, and companies shouldn’t be able to freely trade in an unregulated market.
Governor Wallace went on to make the case in the 57 minute mark of his 1964 UCLA address that blacks can’t compete with whites, so for their own good they should be separated. His proof was that there were fifteen black college presidents in Alabama and he couldn’t name one in desegregated California.
There is nothing racist about voluntary exchanges, and socialism gives racists a state apparatus to coerce racial enemies unjustly. Under capitalism, if I’m racist and I don’t sell to blacks, I lose their business. Under socialism, I can get the state to tax them and redistribute their money to myself without having to create value in exchange. Prejudice can exist under any system, but capitalism makes racism less profitable (less potential customers and smaller employee pool) and allows us to freely disassociate from bigots while socialism gives bigots a police force to unilaterally impose their will on the rest of us.
Have you ever seen wall to wall coverage from the corporate press discussing the police murdering white man Tony Timpa on camera? How about Kelly Thomas? Far from being a white supremacist nation, the West today uses the racism conspiracy theory to get the feebleminded masses to demand bigger and bigger government programs.
The mass white death currently occurring in Ukraine is eagerly encouraged by the establishment, the mass white death of the American Civil War is celebrated, the mass white death of the First World War is hardly seen as a tragedy, and the most widely recognized evil in history is the German National Socialists, leading to the common justification that bombing white German civilians was morally justifiable. To get an idea of the scale of German civilian deaths, the National WWII Museum estimates 8.8 million German military and civilian deaths in the Second World War, while the ethnic cleansing and mass murder operation in Gaza today by the Israeli regime is estimated at 43,000 civilians and military combatants combined.
Regarding the claim that income disparities prove racism, Asians have higher incomes than whites in America, as do Nigerian immigrants. If employer racism explains the white/black gap, the socialist must explain why employers pay Asians and Nigerian immigrants more money than whites on average. Could it be that they have different skills, different jobs, different work ethics, and create different amounts of value for employers?
How do socialists explain the straight white male wage gap? Some straight white men are rich, others are homeless.
When it comes to violence, blacks commit violent crimes against whites far more often than the other way around. According to Dr. Michael Huemer at the University of Colorado:
“[H]omicides committed by blacks against whites are more than twice as common as homicides by whites against blacks in the U.S., despite that there are 5.6 times more white people than black people in the U.S.A randomly chosen black person is thus 13 times more likely to kill a white person than a random white person is to kill a black person.”
None of this is to encourage bigotry. Men are far more violent than women statistically, but I do not advocate discriminating or negatively generalizing any group based on arbitrary demographics. The point stands that the white supremacy conspiracy theory has been debunked.
Which of these sounds more selfish and individualist?
- I can only get your money if you trade with me voluntarily. If I hire you for mutually agreed upon benefits, you can quit at any time.
- Give me 40% of your income to fund a welfare state which never achieves its stated goals or I’ll have the police put you in jail and shoot you if you resist.
Which sounds more selfish or “individualistic”?
If socialists really cared about the community, they would look into how Singapore went from rags to riches by adopting more free market policies. How billions of people in China and India (China since 1979, India since 1991) have been lifted from absolute poverty by adopting more free trade, and more rights to voluntarily contract with corporations who train people in backwards areas to be productive.
Advocates of democracy associate democratic governance with the will of the people, therefore it’s the government that represents people’s preferences. Of course this is backwards. The voluntary sector where people compete and are free to contract represents us better than a state which has the right to impose unilateral obligations on hundreds of millions of strangers by legal fiat.
What does this have to do with destroying nature?
Since government is the socialist entity in society (because it’s democratic, not private), socialists must logically take the blame for all the destruction of government wars from Oliver Cromwell, to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, along with mass murder campaigns being waged today in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
All societies use natural resources. Capitalism rewards people who plant trees in the present, and conserve them in hopes of increasing the asset value for future selling. Notice how socialists switch between seeing property as a parasitic construct, and also the very thing that needs protecting.
When Black Lives Matter riots destroy neighborhoods which people live in, loot stores where people shop for food, and destroy investment which took a century to erect, the socialist tells us it’s just property got over it.
But when it comes to the need for the state to tax or regulate property, those trillions of dollars (property) are very valuable and the state must seize them for the well being of the masses. When socialists say, “We want trillions for schools, health care, housing, infrastructure, abortion clinics,” are they talking about trillions of humans or the importance of property?
Consider the contempt socialists have for the masses. First they take their income by threat of force via taxation, then tax the property people “own,” then deny working parents school choice, then complain that the world uses too many resources even when these very resources allow the average person today to live a life of luxury most kings and queens of the past never could have imagined.
The chart below from HumanProgress shows that resources become more abundant overtime because capitalists invest in looking for new alternatives of how to achieve peoples desired ends. Between 1980 and 2017 the time price (amount of time one person has to work to acquire access to a certain product or service) has drastically decreased, thanks to capitalism.
It’s amazing how a society that proudly boasts “never hit a woman” and has only enslaved men in military conscription to die in wars based on lies could be accused of “misogyny.” Since socialists believe disparities between groups are proof of discrimination, here are a few statistics from Progressive Myths by Dr. Michael Huemer:
“Males make up only 50% of the population but 95.5% of the police shooting victims.” (p. 63)
“The gender pay gap statistics do not control for occupation or other relevant factors. In other words, they are not, in fact, about the same work or equal work. Rather, almost all of the gap is due to men and women doing different work.” (p.100)
“[M]en suffer over 90% of all workplace deaths in America each year.” (p. 105)
If socialists want to empower the average person, that is only done by decriminalizing all economic activity between consenting adults and increasing each person’s capacity to make the most of their talents in a social setting.
