Newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promises to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Funny that he chose those words.
In Europe, where collectivist anti-fossil-fuels “green” policies have been enacted in the name of combating a conjured-up climate emergency, many people get dangerously cold in the winter. So far, this hasn’t happened on a large scale in America, where the climate collectivists have not been as adept in imposing their lethal program as their European counterparts. Freer markets keep people warmer in winter.
Zero-sum thinking, which is at the heart of socialism, also has a knack for creating a frigid attitude toward one’s fellow man. When you believe that one person’s gain is another’s, perhaps your loss, you don’t view your successful neighbor with warmth. The victims of Stalin’s collectivist famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, some of whom were driven to cannibalism to survive, probably did not regard their neighbors or even their family members benevolently. Envy, suspicion, and hostility were characteristic of other places where ostensibly well-meaning rulers condemned selfishness and imposed various forms of collectivism. The death toll beggars belief. Some remain in denial about it. We can be certain that those catastrophes did not befall those tens of millions of innocent victims because they were deprived of a chance to vote on which clueless bureaucrats would administer society’s central plan, as Mamdani and his “democratic” socialist followers suggest.
On the other hand, individualism in ethics and politics fosters benevolence—warmth—among individuals, who, mindful of their own rights and struggles to achieve values, respect the rights and struggles of others. Solidarity among individualists is no more a contradiction than the solidarity of members of a jazz band.
Note that Mamdani uses the adjective rugged. Why? It is part of the ages-old smear campaign against the “selfish” pursuit of happiness. Jefferson’s Locke-inspired inclusion of that phrase in the Declaration of Independence did not, unfortunately, admit egoism back into respectability. (It had some respectability in ancient Greece.)
Capitalism’s detractors deploy the adjective rugged to suggest a system of myopic and short-sighted persons “greedily” stepping on and over one another in a mad free-for-all grab for material wealth. But aside from a relative few, that’s not what typically happens when people are free. They quickly observe the gains from trade, the division of labor, and other market-based social cooperation, such as partnerships and corporations. (Ludwig von Mises nearly titled Human Action, his magnum opus, Social Cooperation.)
The benefits of free exchange to mutual advantage—win-win—were too obvious to ignore. The unprecedented and enduring increase in per-capita wealth that began around 1800 in the West was blindingly clear to all who were not determined to pretend it was not occurring. But what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment” had another payoff besides hitherto-unknown widespread affluence: the fostering of benevolence. The gains from trade had to foster a goodwill that went beyond “mere” justice. Adam Smith famously pointed out that in the marketplace, one best serves one’s own interests by attending to the interests of others. Such attention inevitably fosters warm acquaintanceships, friendships, and much more. (On the relationship between egoism and goodwill, see David Kelley’s Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence.)
Capitalism’s detractors hate that feature of the marketplace. In effect, they say, “That doesn’t count as benevolence because it’s done out of self-regard!” How silly. How childish. What could be more worthwhile than a social arrangement in which the interests of diverse individuals—each with his or her own dreams, aspirations, and values— fundamentally align? It’s an arrangement in which, unlike in the animal kingdom, the arena of competition is not consumption, but production. Consequently, the limits of nature’s scarcity have been progressively loosened to a point where most of the eight billion people alive today live better than the one billion lived in 1800. (The lagging remainder continues to be victimized by collectivism. Liberalism has yet to come to town.)
You have some studying to do, Mr. Mayor. Too bad you didn’t do it before embarking on your political career. Lives would have been spared.
