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The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.
But business, the target of fanatical hatred on the part of all contemporary governments and self-styled intellectuals, acquires and preserves bigness only because it works for the masses.
Infant mortality dropped, the average length of life was prolonged, the population multiplied, and the average common man enjoyed amenities of which even the well-todo of earlier ages did not dream.
Its main achievement was the transfer of economic supremacy from the owners of land to the totality of the population.
There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do.
Because his blindness made it impossible for him to see the role the market and the consumers play under capitalism, he could not see the difference between freedom and slavery.
Socialism substitutes the sovereignty of a dictator, or committee of dictators, for the sovereignty of the consumers.
Liberty, says the Bolshevist, is a bourgeois prejudice. The common man does not have any ideas of his own, he does not write books, does not hatch heresies, and does not invent new methods of production.
Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services. As far as individuals have the opportunity to choose, they are free; if they are forced by violence or threat of violence to surrender to the terms of an exchange, no matter how they feel about it, they lack freedom.
Government is essentially the negation of liberty. It is the recourse to violence or threat of violence in order to make all people obey the orders of the government, whether they like it or not.
All this talk about the concentration of economic power is vain. The bigger a corporation is, the more people it serves, the more does it depend on pleasing the consumers, the many, the masses. Economic power, in the market economy, is in the hands of the consumers.
There is no record of an industrial innovation contrived and put into practice by bureaucrats.
The welfare state with its methods of easy money, credit expansion and undisguised inflation continually takes bites out of all claims payable in units of the nation’s legal tender.
THE DISTINCTIVE principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State.
The social system of private property and limited government is the only system that tends to debarbarize all those who have the innate capacity to acquire personal culture.
Still less is it justified to long for the totalitarian utopias, whether of the Nazi or of the Soviet type.
