Ray Harvey

In a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, socialist documentarian Michael Moore — who, not coincidentally, made a socialist propaganda movie called Capitalism: A Love Story — revealed Monday (September 27th, 2011) what we all already knew: he has no understanding whatsoever of what capitalism really is.

The video clip won’t embed, but you can watch it here (and I suggest you do).

This is what Michael Moore said:

When you say the word capitalism, you have to talk about it in its current sense. You can’t told about the old days or the way maybe, you know, Adam Smith. The sort of old capitalism….

[In the] old days when you worked hard and prospered, everyone else prospered as well. And not only that, as you prospered, the wealth was shared with your employees, with the government. Everybody had a piece of the pie. You, who started the business or invented the light bulb or whatever, you got a bigger piece of the pie. And you know what, nobody cared because you invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing….

None of the major religions, in fact they all, say it’s one of the worst sins you could commit, is to take such a large piece of the pie while others suffer.

Isn’t that heavy?

But the truth is, capitalism is the diametric opposite of what Michael Moore would have you believe.

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.

This issue — capitalism-versus-socialism — hinges upon one thing, and this one thing is the only thing you’ll ever need to know about the subject: private ownership (capitalism) versus public or government ownership (socialism).

Do we each own ourselves and (corollarily) our property?

Or do others own us and our property?

Money is property.

Capitalism is an entire political theory — not, as is sometimes supposed, merely economic.

The exclusively economic component of capitalism can be described as the right to life, liberty, and property applied to commerce and industry.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism, which does not exist now and has never existed fully, means that government removes itself from all commerce (and that includes healthcare), in the same way that government removes itself from the bedroom.

In addition to early America, there is at least one other society that has come close to laissez faire capitalism:

“After the War Hong Kong had no minimum wage, low and simple taxes, zero tariffs, zero capital controls, and a stable legal environment. Postwar Hong Kong went as far with economic laissez faire as any other country in history. This resulted in economic development that benefited virtually all the people of Hong Kong. Living standards increased substantially even for the poorest people in Hong Kong” (Stefan Karlsson, “Inflation Leads to Protectionism,” 2004).

Capitalism means that commerce and industry are entirely privatized.

Corporations that receive government subsidies are not capitalistic. They’re the opposite: they’re mercantilistic.
The same is true of small businesses and farms that receive subsidies.

Trade tariffs are not capitalistic but mercantilistic.

Mercantilism is an ancient and more primitive form of socialism. It is socialism before Karl Marx.

Political theory is the theory of government, and government, properly defined, is the body politic that possesses rule over a certain specified geographic region.

Economics is the science of production and exchange, but production does not just mean agriculture, although that is certainly included.

Productive work is any kind of work geared toward the task of survival — survival in the fully human sense of the word, including, therefore, arts, sports, industry, and so on.

Thus the essential questions of government are these:

Do humans exist by right or by permission?

Are we free by nature?

If so, why?

Are we free to produce, exchange, and exist, or do politicians, elected or not, have authority and jurisdiction over the lives of us — to any degree?

Obviously, there’s only one sane answer to all these questions; for to say that humans do not exist by right is the same as saying humans only exist when someone permits us to. But if that were true, we must then ask: who permits? And why? And who gives these people permission?

Fundamentally, political freedom can be achieved only through recognizing each and every single individual’s right to life.

If, then, you believe that we are each individuated and sovereign, and if you believe that our lives are entirely our own and not the government’s and not another’s, if, in short, you believe “we each have a property in our person,” as John Locke said, then you believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.

You believe, therefore, in laissez-faire capitalism.


More here on the many permutations of socialism.

I thought the following was exceptionally accurate.

From ex-liberal Roger Simon:

President Obama’s been taking a lot of flak lately for not having a plan. First it was about Libya, but now — even more importantly because, as we know, all politics is local (until it’s not) — about the budget.

The latest White House porte-parole Jay Carney has consequently been taking all kinds of in-coming himself about “where’s the President’s budget plan,” “why doesn’t he have a plan,” etc.

Well, the reason for the latter is simple: because he can’t. The minute the president evinces a budget plan, the game is up. No liberal budget will stand up to scrutiny. There is no money left for deficit spending in our aging society. The welfare state is kaput. It’s gone — probably for generations to come.

Of course, there’s always that canard about taxing the rich. That will save things. But the truth is even if you tax the rich at 100%, it barely sets back our entitlement crisis a year or two, while virtually bankrupting the few job creators who remain.

So no wonder Obama doesn’t have a plan. What would it be?

Rich Miniter put a fine point on it in a recent article for Forbes, “Why the Democratic Party is Doomed.”

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies.

Miniter’s right. As an ex-lib, it almost makes me feel sorry for liberals. But I’m not because too many of them are still playing ostrich. One lib friend just sent me an email — I’m still somehow on her list — trumpeting a 1954 (!) quote from Eisenhower: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

I guess the implication here is that’s what Republicans are trying to do, when, especially in the case of Social Security, they are the only ones making a serious effort to save it (see Paul Ryan). But liberals must preserve their delusions — and actually not read the small print, in Ryan’s proposal or anybody else’s. After all, they are people with no plans. Why should anybody else have them?

(Link)

Whether people recognize it or not is beside the point: the welfare state is doomed by definition because in order to have the wealth to redistribute, one must first have someone producing that wealth, which (in turn) requires capital — as in capitalism — and that pool will pretty quickly dry up, especially when you vilify and punish the producers.

Most in the mainstream are busy vilifying McDonald’s, but not me.

In fact, I’ve defended McDonald’s before, against the outrageous environmental hoops through which the religion of environmentalism has pressured McDonald’s to jump, and so I was particularly delighted to read Jeffry Tucker’s excellent essay also in defense of those golden arches.

Here’s an excerpt:

McDonald’s as the Paradigm of Progress

I feel vindicated by recent data on this company’s hiring in the midst of terrible economic times.

The national labor-participation rate has been falling for a decade and is now as low as it was during the 1982 recession. If people were leaving the workplace with wads of cash and every intention of living out their dream of a life of leisure, this might be good news.

Sadly, all evidence runs the other direction. People want remunerative work but can’t find it, and their situation is getting worse not better, thanks mainly to legal restrictions and artificial burdens borne by institutions that would otherwise be hiring.

McDonald’s appears to be responsible for more than half the new jobs being created right now: its April jobs fair added 30,000 people to its payrolls. It has bucked the trend — a bit like swimming against the tide.

But instead of congratulating this great company for doing the impossible, the judgment in the press is harsh. Burger flipping is the only work to be had out there? Surely this is evidence of how pathetic economic growth is.

The trouble with this line is that it doesn’t recognize how difficult it is for an institution to adapt itself and still grow in this climate. And how does McDonald’s do it? It is an old recipe: watch the markets, emulate the successful, adapt and change, and slavishly serve the consuming public.

The reinvention of McDonald’s began only two years ago, as its management noted the new vogue for healthy food and fancy coffees and fruit smoothies served up in a posh environment such as Starbucks offers. Can McDonald’s, the very embodiment of the lowbrow urge for a greasy burger and fries, actually horn in on this market?

It doesn’t seem likely, but the company gave it a try. There were new breakfast items like fruit parfaits. There was an apple-and-walnuts salad, along with many other premium salads, for lunch. There was a new premium burger made of Angus beef (which to me tastes as good as a restaurant-style burger). There were new fruit smoothies that taste as good (or better) than the ones that cost twice as much at the hip smoothie bars.

Not that McDonald’s merely chases public fads. The company responded to an earlier outcry for diet food by making the McLean sandwich in the mid 1990s. No one bought it. The company dropped it from the menu. The lesson is that public piety is not the same thing as actual spending habits. Future development would be rooted in reality, and it certainly is today.

Most of all there was the addition of new coffee drinks. Each is made from freshly ground beans, with the addition of fresh milk (whole or low fat), all made upon order. McDonald’s added its own spin. The most annoying aspect of Starbucks, as everyone knows, is the wait. Everything is done by hand, from the cleaning to the packing of grounds.

McDonald’s has a new machine that does everything. The beans fall through a large funnel. The milk is sucked out of gallons from the doors underneath. The nozzles and containers are cleaned after each drink by superhot steam blasts. The human hand only gets involved at the beginning to push buttons and at the end to give it all one last stir. The time it takes to make this fresh treat is reduced to half or even one-third of the Starbucks time.

Then there is the cost issue. A latte at McDonald’s costs 40 percent less than the same at Starbucks. And you don’t have to use strange words like venti or grande when you order. At McDonald’s, they seem to understand normal English words like small, medium, and large….

In a striking way, this approach is deeply embedded in the company’s history. The first restaurant opened in 1940 and closed for renovations in 1948, only to reopen as the first drive-through restaurant. Its first indoor-seating restaurant didn’t open until 1962. Since then, the company has taken glorious steps forward that have foreshadowed global change: it opened in Moscow in 1990, Warsaw in 1992, and on the Web in 1996.

Let’s be clear here. It’s not the case that the management of this company has an unusually high devotion to the well-being of humanity. The management is following the pricing signals and making entrepreneurial judgments all in the service of the consuming public. It is a great competitor, relentlessly reinventing itself in an effort to win the affections of the eating-out public.

The managers here might be the greatest humanitarians in history or they might be the greediest and most selfish people on earth. It really doesn’t matter. The market is the driving force and the profitability signals are the test of whether the company is or is not doing the right thing. This is the very heartbeat of the capitalistic process — the one spotted and dissected centuries ago by economists in France, Spain, Italy, and England.
Renovated McDonald’s Interior
“The result is not just a beautiful model for serving up food but a beautiful model for social service in general.”

These old liberals saw that the capitalistic process is the answer to the great social and moral problems raised by thinkers of all ages precisely because it pours every manner of human motivation into the grand project of satisfying the needs and wants of all society’s members. If economic science had one main point to contribute to the world of ideas, this was it.

A most impressive feature of capitalism that is highlighted in the McDonald’s case is how its institutions so beautifully adapt themselves to change. The drift is always upward: new and improved. And this drift is like a wind that never stops blowing unless it is stopped by the organized force of the state….

The addition or removal of the king-consumer from the process of reform amounts to a fundamental change in the whole raison d’être of an institution. It’s true that McDonald’s is not entirely sustained by the market alone, and even overly scrupulous libertarians have jumped on the attack. It’s true that it has been reported that some of its business loans were backed by TARP money after the crisis of 2008, and, of course, it benefits indirectly from subsidies on corn and the like.

By the same token, it is also wickedly punished by the state, paying 30 percent taxes on earnings and shoveling some $2 billion into the federal treasury every year — all money that might otherwise be used for capital upgrades, dividends, or expansions.

The crucial way to tell a predominantly market-based company from a state-based company is to investigate its primary institutional interest: does it serve the state or does it serve the consuming public? There can be no question where McDonald’s is on this spectrum, and the result is not just a beautiful model for serving up food but a beautiful model for social service in general.

McDonald’s is a prime example of how the market has overcome a fundamental human problem: getting enough to eat. This is a problem that vexed the whole of humanity from the beginning of time. Now it appears to be almost entirely solved, thanks to institutions such as McDonald’s, which people feel entitled to criticize and smear because they seem to be such a fixed element in the universe.

(Link)

The following is, on a micro level, a perfect compendiation of free-trade versus government regulation, all in the name of the so-called common good.

It was written by a bureaucrat (no less) fellow free-marketeer named Nicolas Martin, who’s the executive director of the Consumer Health Education Council in Indianapolis — and whom I incorrectly branded a bureaucrat until he gently corrected me — and it provides us with an excellent illustration of the axiom that once allowed in, bureaucracy becomes unstoppable.

From the May 1, 2011, Los Angeles Times:

My 8-year-old recently got the lemonade stand itch. So we started laying plans to enrich her college fund by enticing passers-by with white chocolate-pistachio cookies and juice from organic lemons. Fortunately, our property backs onto one of the busiest paved urban trails in America, bustling on weekends with cyclists, rollerbladers and pedestrians. Visions of dollars danced in our heads.

Googling for the perfect lemonade recipe, we soon found a site promoting a May 1 “national” event called Lemonade Day. This event, organizers say, is an “initiative designed to teach kids how to start, own and operate their own business — a lemonade stand.” What better day to begin building our lemonade empire?

After shopping for her raw materials, I gave my kid a bedtime primer about starting a business. How much profit do you make after expenses? How should you promote your business? Give the customer a great product. She soaked it up and went to sleep all inspiration and smiles. Then I got to thinking about something I hadn’t discussed with her: government regulations.

The next morning I began a three-day phone trek through the maze of government agencies that regulate businesses and food sales, and I watched my child’s All-American plan crumble like fresh-baked cookies.

My first call was to the parks department, which maintains the trail. That agency is a sponsor of the local Lemonade Day, but, alas, does not permit lemonade stands on its properties any other day of the year. It especially doesn’t allow them alongside the trail. Why? They would be “dangerous”; accidents would happen. Do they expect any accidents on Lemonade Day, I asked? “No, we are confident nothing bad will happen that day.” Poof! Our best option for a profitable lemonade stand was gone.

My next calls were to the health department, where I eventually found an official who cheerfully told me that, except on Lemonade Day, no child can legally operate a lemonade stand in our city. Nowhere. No time. As far as she is concerned, Lemonade Day itself is just food poisoning waiting to happen.

A practical woman as well as a killjoy, she said that near her home, she wouldn’t prevent a kid from operating a stand: “The neighbors would hate me.” But if her department got a complaint about a kid in another neighborhood, the enforcement team would be dispatched. The kid would be instructed to shut down his stand. If he refused to obey, the police would be called to cite the child for violating the health code, which applies to children no less than to adults.

Most likely, no official would brave public ridicule for lowering the boom on a kid with a lemonade stand. But a parent might be a less controversial target for enforcement penalties, which could include fines and even jail time.

Don’t scoff. From time to time, zealous officials do force kids to shut down their lemonade stands. Even Girl Scouts have gotten into trouble for selling cookies in front of homes and businesses.

What the Lemonade Day organizers should teach the children, said the health official, is about the importance of learning and obeying the government regulations that prohibit lemonade stands.

If we had made it past the health and parks departments, my kid would have been stymied by zoning laws that prohibit lemonade stands in residential neighborhoods. Overcoming that barrier, we would have hung our heads at the daunting costs of business and vending licenses, not to mention taxes.

Lemonade Day is promoted as a way to “inspire a budding entrepreneur!” But it is actually a dispiriting lesson about how hard it now is to become an entrepreneur, whether you’re an adult or a child. It is about how even the most harmless enterprise, the humble lemonade stand, has been sacrificed on the altar of government regulation.

Learning to be an entrepreneur “starts with a lemonade stand,” say the organizers of Lemonade Day. But they don’t want to talk about the regulations that make it impossible for my kid to become a lemonade stand entrepreneur. They tell me it is “silly” and “beside the point” to focus on the regulations. I am told that Lemonade Day is about kids learning to “give back to their communities,” “do better in school” and “open bank accounts.” It is not about something so self-serving as making a profit by selling a good product. That is the old American way, but the new way is living with rules that banish the lemonade stand to one government-approved day a year.

What are my kid and I going to do on Lemonade Day? We are going to set up a stand in one of the permitted locations — in a park or at one of the approved sponsors — with hundreds of other kids doing the same thing. But our “secret ingredient” is that we will hand out leaflets explaining why operating a lemonade stand makes my kid and yours not just a hopeful entrepreneur, but an actual lawbreaker.

Next year they should rename it Regulation Day.

(Link)

Bernie Marcus is the CEO and cofounder of Home Depot — or, as it’s known to the anti-business, buy-local-only groupies, Home Despot. In the following video, Bernie Marcus correctly demolishes their (non)argument:

(Video via joegerarden)

Hat tip Doug Powers.

From a Providence newspaper, local fishermen are infuriated over the Obama administration’s junk science catch limits: “All these politicians scream about is jobs, jobs, jobs. Why are they putting us out of business?”

Another local fishermen took out the following full-page ad in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette:

EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts – Aug 24, 2010 – The Northeast Seafood Coalition has taken out a full page ad in today’s Vineyard Gazette. The ad is an open letter to President Obama from Russell Sherman, captain of the Fishing Vessel Lade Jane of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The text follows:

“MR. PRESIDENT, WE NEED YOUR HELP”

Dear President Obama,

My name is Russell Sherman, and I am a life-long fisherman. Like New England fisherman before me have done for 387 years, I take my vessel, the 72-foot F/V Lady Jane from the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, into North Atlantic waters to bring back cod, haddock, flounder, and other groundfish for America’s table. I hope that while you’re in New England, you and your family are enjoying a few meals of our fresh catch – there’s none better tasting or healthier in the world.

Mr. President, my fellow fishermen and I need your leadership. We are small businessmen and women who want to continue the profession we love. We have worked hard over the past 16 years to rebuild groundfish stocks. Today, some stocks are fully rebuilt, and most others are expected to rebuild in three years, by 2014. According to federal forecasts, a fully rebuilt fishery will yield a sustainable catch nearly five times current landings.

At a time when we should be hopeful about the future of our businesses, we are desperate instead. We are being driven from our work and the fishery we have helped to rebuild. Ironically, what’s putting us out of work are the rules to rebuild the fishery. The most recent version of these rules – effective on May 1, 2010 – impose very low annual catch limits on stocks for the next three years, and at the same time institute a
“catch share” system.

Take my case. Under the 2010 rules, my permit allows an annual catch of only 60,000 lbs of groundfish. At an average price of $1.50 a pound, that’s an annual gross of $90,000, or about one-quarter of my business’ gross income last year. I simply cannot run my business and support my crew of four – each with a family – on only $90,000 a year.

My business is only one of hundreds facing extinction. While there will be a small handful of “winners” under these new rules, the vast majority of us will be losers. And when we “losers” are forced out, jobs will be lost, coastal communities gutted, and crucial commercial fishing infrastructure gone forever. Is this the way to rebuild our storied, centuries-old groundfish fishery?

I belong to an organization called the Northeast Seafood Coalition, a New England-wide organization of 255 small, entrepreneurial fishing businesses and allied support businesses that participates in the public process. The Coalition has tried to bring this matter to the attention of your Department of Commerce. We have tried to offer constructive solutions to the challenge of rebuilding fisheries without at the same time destroying them. But our efforts have fallen on deaf ears.

Mr. President, we desperately need your leadership. We ask that you please direct your Department of Commerce to listen to us and work with us. We know that we can meet this challenge by working together.

Sincerely yours,
Russell Sherman, Captain, F/V Lady Jane Port of Gloucester, Massachusetts

Here’s the video footage:

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. Harvey: What is the difference between communism, democratic socialism, and welfare statism?

– Sincerely Confused

Dear Sincerely Confused: First of all, Mr. Harvey is my dad. Please call me Ray.

Communism is a species of the genus socialism; it is one of the many variations on that tired theme. Communism explicitly calls for the violent overthrow of government. In theory, it is an anarchist ideology, believing that the state will one day magically “wither away,” as Karl Marx famously phrased it, though only after an unspecified period of gigantic bureaucratic control. Of course, in the long and blood-soaked history of communism, the state has never withered away, and never will. Why? Once entrenched, bureaucracy is impossible to retrogress away from.

Democratic socialism, on the other hand, doesn’t advocate the violent overthrow of government but intends to use force peacefully. By definition, by its very nature, socialism must resort to force because it must expropriate people’s money and other property in order to redistribute it. That is the distinguishing characteristic of any and all forms of socialism: government control of property and the means of production (which is one of the reasons so-called corporatism is another variation on socialism).

One must never forget: socialism is by definition an ideology of force.

Not all liberals are socialists — in large part because most of them don’t even know what “socialism” means, and it is for this reason also that many liberals, and, for that matter, many conservatives, are socialists and do not even know it.

Welfare statism is not exactly the same thing as democratic socialism. Welfare statism wants all the wealth and advantages that capitalism and private property creates, but at the same time, it wants to undermine the very things that makes all that wealth possible. Welfare statism takes for granted the advantages of capitalism — it wants to hold power over the producers of wealth — yet it wants those same wealth-producers to keep producing it for them. It is a short-sighted ideology the prevalence of which dominates academia from sea to shining sea.

The welfare state, which is what we live in today and have for some time, is the result of what von Mises called the “hampered or mixed market economy.” It is not identical to socialism proper, primarily because it is not explicit enough, but it too is a variation on the same theme.

The hard rock miner died last night, a beefy man, a strong man, with the soft-sad eyes of a thoughtful child.

His name was Neil. He’d been a miner most of his life. He chewed Copenhagen and played guitar (he loved hard rock). In Vietnam he’d been awarded the Silver Star for an act of great courage.

After the war, at twenty-five, he went to work in a uranium mine outside Moab called The Gentleman Sloan. Two years later, he moved into the coal-mining country of east-central Wyoming. Then, at age thirty-one, he drove down to the spiky mountains of southwestern Colorado and began working in a gold mine called The Equity, which is where he remained for the rest of his life.

His end began suddenly, less than ten months ago, when he was only fifty-eight-years-old. He found, one unforgettable evening, a terrifying eruption of crystal-like growths all along his ribcage. His doctors punched cylindrical core samples out his skin. They drilled him full of holes and loaded him with tubes like tiny sticks of dynamite, blasting caps of pinkish-blue. Cancer is what they found. Cancer blooming like clusters of quartz everywhere beneath his skin.

The strangeness of this was not lost on him: that something so small could take down a man his size—a man so living and vital, a man, in short, like him. He hadn’t expected to die this way. He thought his end would come in the cold dark caves among the echo-drip of black water, or from blacklung.

Or perhaps on his way home from work one star-sprent frozen night, a wall of white would come pounding down out of the galactic blackness above, building in a moment a skyscraper of snow atop him and his jeep. But it had not been so.

Enraged, he cursed at first. And overnight his skin went totally slack, the flesh about the bones—a padding—melting like candlewax. His temples grew indrawn, clustered with silver veins. For reasons the doctors could not explain, the cave of his mouth began to morph so that his palate became a ceiling of ribbed rock, tasting of sulfur and sprouting miniature stalactites of limey tissue, or bone. The gold-and-copper of his hair, which had lasted him his whole life, now faded to galena threads, threads of winking lead.

Over the years, the mines had exacted heavy tolls upon his health, as mines so often will. A chronic cough plagued him the last decade of his life. He had poor blood circulation, his veins dying like underground streams inside his skin, and his skin, from head-to-toe, transparent, mica-thin.

Twenty years previous, on a cold autumn morning, while he was exploring an abandoned shaft, he was brought up short by an iron fist clenching inside his chest; it sent him running back in the direction he had come. He’d barely made it. Lack of oxygen, they said, had caused a small heart attack. Thereafter his “ticker” (as he termed it) was never again the same.

And who could forget the time, early on in his mining career, when a stone slab the size of a boxcar busted loose from the low rock ceiling above and mashed him face-first into the soggy ground. He lay like that for two days and two nights, unable to move at all, while his headlamp subsided into ultimate black, and he, half-delirious, heard the whole time the purling of underground streams rocking gently by. This, he thought, is it; this is how I die.

His rescuers told him later that the softness of the earth and the freezing cold had, in part, saved him, but mainly, they whispered among themselves, it was the sheer strength of his will, and the strength of his muscle and bone.

Still, for all this, he loved his work. He loved the whole lifestyle, loved it with his body and soul. He loved the sound of sluicing water, the smell of wet mineral and adamantine stone. He loved the vitreous air where he worked (and worked), the air itself exuding sparseness, the reek of ozone and pine. He loved the sandy tailing ponds, their poisonous waters, the sound of the ravens grokking at him from the firs all around the mine, and the firs themselves stunted and dark and weird, crepitating with human-like moans. He loved all the magpie and the chipmunks and the fat brown marmots – “whistle pigs,” he called them – sunning themselves in the sharp western sunlight the short summers long; he loved the arsenic-burned rocks they scorched their bellies on.

He loved the massive gray shadows that tilted the ground, and the white dusty earth that the ubiquitous mountains cast their shadows upon.

He loved Sugarloaf peak in spring, with its necktie of mist and wig of snow, and the ragged mountains beyond poking the sky – and that sky forever, in his memory, tarnished like zinc, or a verdigris stone.

The rarified air he could never get enough of: the glassy gales in autumn and the mean winter wind pouring down from the milky sky above, rushing through the conifers in sporadic bursts and blowing the black cliffs bare of vapor and snow, showing naked chines of rock – rock everywhere, the smell of rock, rock rearing up into the high-altitude air, angular walls all along the roads that led up to the mines.

To him this was worth ten years of life.

And his life was not yours, or mine.

Our final meeting came on my last day of work, before I moved out of the San Juans for good. He was just coming on shift, swing. He stood at the entrance of the shaft, half turned away. A long shadow from the mouth of the cave fell diagonally across him, and in his hardhat and yellow slicker, the hard rock miner looked like one about ready to fight fires, or cyclones. His headlamp was not turned on yet. His boots were covered in year-old muck; his gloves poked partially out his bib. For some reason, then, I do not know why, he turned to me and waved goodbye. Then he swiveled back around and lumbered alone into the black dripping shaft, where no light shone at all, and then he disappeared forever from my site,
underground.

The United States is not a democracy and was never intended to be. Democracy means majority rule. The rights of each individual, however, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, are inalienable in the literal sense (i.e. cannot be transferred, revoked, or be made alien) and are thus never subject to vote or the “whims of the majority.”

Which is why the word “democracy” does not appear one time in either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

The United States is, as Benjamin Franklin said, a Constitutional Republic.

Calvin Coolidge had a pet pygmy hippo, which he kept in the White House.

Whereas Teddy Roosevelt kept a pet hyena.

Ronald Reagan was once given an honorary doctorate in professional football.

The largest scientific study ever conducted on acid rain (National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, Integrated Assessment, External Review Draft) didn’t find any real evidence that acid rain destroys forests.

As a teaching method, the National Wildlife Federation routinely had students dump highly acidic water on plants to, quote, “simulate acid rain.” Thus, when the plants died, the kids naturally assumed that acid rain kills forests in this same manner.

In 1992, a man in Carson City, Nevada, ran in the Democratic primarily as, quote, “God Almighty!” And did not win.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) was invented to protect American troops in WWII from insect-borne disease.

Despite numerous studies, DDT has never once been shown to be harmful. On the contrary, it has saved more lives than any other chemical invention in the history of the world, with the possible exception of antibiotics.

One spraying of DDT lasts longer than all other pesticides combined. Which is one of the many reasons mosquitoes are less resistant to it.

Since DDT was banned, more pesticides are now required, because none are as effective as DDT.

Which is one of the biggest reasons malaria has come back with such a vengeance.

During the final rush to get the first shipment of DDT out the door to American Troops, a valve at the bottom of a large vessel of DDT accidentally came open. Chemist Joseph Jacobs, who was standing under the vessel when it opened, was covered with hot DDT. “When it dried,” he says, in his autobiography, The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur, “I had DDT an inch thick all over me. In my hair, in my ears, and in my mouth and nose. I took off my clothes, showered, and scrubbed, but probably ingested more DDT during that one incident than is today considered safe to absorb over many years.”

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, which singlehandedly succeeded in getting DDT banned, believed that one touch of DDT could kill you.

Chemist Joseph Jacobs lived another sixty years with no adverse health effects whatsoever.

Joseph Jacobs routinely lectured on the utter safety of DDT. In fact, he began each lecture by eating a spoonful of raw DDT at the podium.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his DDT work and was eighty-eight when he died, in 2004.

“In all the previous wars of history,” wrote chemical engineer O.T. Zimmerman, in 1946, “the louse [singular for lice] has killed more men than ever died from bullets, swords, or other weapons.”

The Audubon Society, though sympathetic to Rachel Carson’s claims, has stated publicly that no extinction or significant loss to bird populations came about through the use of DDT: “of the 40 birds Carson said might by now be extinct or nearly so, 19 have stable populations, 14 have increasing populations, and 7 are declining” (Easterbrook, 1995, p. 82). It should be noted furthermore that the 7 listed as “declining” declined only slightly, and not through any demonstrable link with DDT.

After President Bush senior banned broccoli from the White House in 1990, California broccoli growers delivered nine tons of it to Washington DC.

Science is in large part government-funded. Thus, scientists improve their access to research money if they can show politicians that they are “saving the planet.”

Statistically speaking, scientists who don’t propagate the fear-factor receive far less money than those who do, regardless of the actual truth.

Melvin Shapiro, for instance, head of research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Insight Magazine: “If there were no dollars attached to the game, you’d see it played on intellect and integrity. When you say the ozone threat is a scam, you’re not only attacking people’s scientific integrity, you’re going after their pocketbook as well.”

After that interview, Shapiro stopped taking phone calls. Word circulated that his supervisors censored him for fear of hurting their own funding.

Bureaucrats realize this as well: “When the Superfund Law was passed in 1980 … the EPA’s budget went up almost instantly by hundreds of millions of dollars, and ultimately billions…. The EPA administrator actively campaigned for the Superfund Law…. And, in fact, the law that emerged was largely written by members of the agency” (Facts Not Fear, p. 8).

The Superfund Law has achieved next to nothing — apart, that is, from spending billions in taxpayer dollars.

George Washington carried a sundial instead of a watch to tell time.

More timber grows each year than is cut.

“In the time it takes you to read this letter, nine hundred acres of rainforest will have been destroyed forever,” said Russell E. Train, of the World Wildlife Fund & The Conservation Foundation, back in 1992, a complete fiction, we now know.

The famous statement made by biologist Norman Myers, which sent environmentalists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes, that “2 percent of all tropical forest was being destroyed per year,” and that by “2000 we will have lost a third of the world’s tropical forest” (Myers cited in Goudie 1993:46.), has proved inanely inaccurate.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) puts tropical deforestation in the 1980s at 0.8 percent. In 2001, satellite imagery, which is precise, shows that tropical deforestation had declined to 0.46 percent.

Lack of property rights — i.e. private property — makes tropical deforestation worse.

The snows of Kilimanjaro, one of Al Gore’s pet props, have been receding for a very long time, a well-known fact among scientists, who, additionally, are also quick to note that the temperature on Kilimanjaro has not been going up. Why, then, the recession of Kilimanjaro’s snows? Ice requires cold and moisture. And it’s precisely the latter that’s lacking.

As climate scientist Robert Balling says: “Gore does not acknowledge the two major articles on the subject published in 2004 in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research showing that modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro was initiated by a reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century and not by local or global warming.”

I.e. the local climate shift on Kilimanjaro began a century ago.

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.

In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable.” Doctor Braithwaite’s unequivocal conclusion:

“There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

“By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite” (“It Would Be Nice to Know More about Ice,” Jay Lehr).

On the basis of that logical fallacy known as the fallacy of insufficient evidence, all glacier fears are stopped cold right there.

But in fact that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keith Echelmeyer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, says this:

“To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do… The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response.”

Mr. Echelmeyer goes on to tell us that in Alaska there are large glaciers advancing in the very same areas where others are retreating.

Quoting Doctor Martin Beniston of the Institute of Geography at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

Numerous climatological details of mountains are overlooked by the climate models, which thus makes it difficult to estimate the exact response of glaciers to global warming, because glacier dynamics are influenced by numerous factors other than climate, even though temperature and cloudiness may be the dominant controlling factors. According to the size, exposure and altitude of glaciers, different response times can be expected for the same climatic forcing.

According to the excellent glacier program at Rice University, those response times run something like this:

Ice sheet: 100,000 to 10,000 years

Large valley glacier: 10,000 to 1,000 years

Small valley glacier: 1,000 to 100 years

“Glaciers are influenced by a variety of local and regional natural phenomena that scientists do not fully comprehend. Besides temperature changes, glaciers also respond to changes in the amount and type of precipitation, changes in sea level and changes in ocean circulation patterns. As a result, glaciers do not necessarily advance during colder weather and retreat during warmer weather” (John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy).

Grist magazine: There’s a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What’s the right mix?

Al Gore: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience’s head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis. Over time that mix will change. As the country comes to more accept the reality of the crisis, there’s going to be much more receptivity to a full-blown discussion of the solutions. (Source of this astonishing exchange: Grist Magazine[boldface mine].)

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was a foreign diplomat at age 14.

Teddy Roosevelt once delivered a one-hour speech, despite the fact that he had just been shot by a would-be assassin.

Quondam senator Barry Goldwater recommended peanut butter for shaving cream.

The tenth President of the United States, John Tyler (1790-1862), was unable to get a job after leaving office and so worked at a village pound tending cows and horses.

All the trash produced by the United States for the next one thousand years could fit into a landfill forty-four miles square by 120 feet deep—one tenth of 1 percent of all this country’s entire land area. (“A Consumer’s Guide to Environmental Myths and Realities,” Policy Report #99, National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas, TX, September 1991, 3, quoting Clark Wiseman of Gonzaga University.)

“It is entirely possible that we may be the last generation of humans to know this wondrous earth as it was meant to be,” said the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, many years ago.

“Nearly every habitat is at risk,” said Time Magazine, almost two decades ago. “Swarms of people are running out of food and space …” Which is another statement that time and the facts have exposed as completely false. Thus:

Every man, woman, and child on the planet could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space no bigger than Jacksonville, Florida.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution says Congress has only these powers. To borrow money (not the same thing as taxation); regulate commerce with foreign nations; establish rules for naturalization; coin money and fix standards of weights and measures; punish counterfeiting; establish a post office; promote science with patents; establish the lower courts; punish pirates; declare war; raise and support armies, but only for a term of two years; provide a navy; regulate naval and land forces; call forth the militia; and administer capital.

“It would be impossible to construct a logical argument that these powers permit the massive welfare state and regulatory state that exists today in America,” said Doctor Thomas Dilorenzo, in 2006.

“The United States is not a Christian Nation,” said President John Adams, in the Treaty of Tripoli.

“Private property is the guardian of every other right” said James Madison, the father of the Constitution.

“I precisely advocate the abolition of private property,” said Karl Marx.

“Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned,” said Ludwig von Mises.

“The only alternative to private property is government ownership — that is, socialism,” says Doctor Dilorenzo.

Peter Cooper, inventor of a gelatinous dessert called Jell-O, once ran for the Presidency of the United States.

And lost.

This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, let us instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship.

From Chapter 2 of Leave Us Alone:

The right to property is, as James Madison said, “the guardian” of every other right. Freedom and private property are inseparable. Property is freedom: you cannot be free if you are not free to produce, use, and dispose of those things necessary to your life.

“Control the property, control the person,” said Lenin, correctly.

Property, like every other right, is first and foremost the right to act: specifically, it is the right to produce, exchange, and use.

“Property is not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth…. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner” (Electric Law Library).

Money is property.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: a bureau of centralized planners controlling the property.

If you desire to know precisely what someone’s political viewpoint is, all you need do is find out his or her stance on property; for it is through the stance on property that the entire political philosophy is disclosed. You needn’t listen to anything anyone says about “freedom” or “liberty” or any of these other easy platitudes: no one in her or his right mind will go against those things. Instead, simply check the stance on property. If someone doesn’t believe in full private property rights, that person is, to the exact extent he or she denies private property rights, a statist.

Property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom.

To defend freedom, therefore, you must start by defending the unalienable right to property.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (James Madison, Federal Papers 10).

Government is instituted no less for protection of the PROPERTY, than of the persons (James Madison, Federalist Paper #54, emphasis in the original).

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management (Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval).

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings (Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours).

The political institutions of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free possession of property (Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms).

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence (John Adams).

Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action).

The following address was delivered before the University Club of New York, April 18, 1950, by Doctor Ludwig von Mises:

How Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism

The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism and communism is that the market economy or capitalism is a system that hurts the vital interests of the immense majority of people for the sole benefit of a small minority of rugged individualists. It condemns the masses to progressing impoverishment. It brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites.

This doctrine was not the work of Karl Marx. It had been developed long before Marx entered the scene. Its most successful propagators were not the Marxian authors, but such men as Carlyle and Ruskin, the British Fabians, the German professors and the American Institutionalists. And it is a very significant fact that the correctness of this dogma was contested only by a few economists who were very soon silenced and barred from access to the universities, the press, the leadership of political parties and, first of all, public office. Public opinion by and large accepted the condemnation of capitalism without any reservation.

1. Socialism

But, of course, the practical political conclusions which people drew from this dogma were not uniform. One group declared that there is but one way to wipe out these evils, namely to abolish capitalism entirely. They advocate the substitution of public control of the means of production for private control. They aim at the establishment of what is called socialism, communism, planning, or state capitalism. All these terms signify the same thing. No longer should the consumers, by their buying and abstention from buying, determine what should be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. Henceforth a central authority alone should direct all production activities.

2. Interventionism, Allegedly a Middle-of-the-Road Policy

A second group seems to be less radical. They reject socialism no less than capitalism. They recommend a third system, which, as they say, is as far from capitalism as it is from socialism, which as a third system of society’s economic organization, stands midway between the two other systems, and while retaining the advantages of both, avoids the disadvantages inherent in each. This third system is known as the system of interventionism. In the terminology of American politics it is often referred to as the middle-of-the-road policy. What makes this third system popular with many people is the particular way they choose to look upon the problems involved. As they see it, two classes, the capitalists and entrepreneurs on the one hand and the wage earners on the other hand, are arguing about the distribution of the yield of capital and entrepreneurial activities. Both parties are claiming the whole cake for themselves. Now, suggest these mediators, let us make peace by splitting the disputed value equally between the two classes. The State as an impartial arbiter should interfere, and should curb the greed of the capitalists and assign a part of the profits to the working classes. Thus it will be possible to dethrone the moloch capitalism without enthroning the moloch of totalitarian socialism.

Yet this mode of judging the issue is entirely fallacious. The antagonism between capitalism and socialism is not a dispute about the distribution of booty. It is a controversy about which two schemes for society’s economic organization, capitalism or socialism, is conducive to the better attainment of those ends which all people consider as the ultimate aim of activities commonly called economic, viz., the best possible supply of useful commodities and services. Capitalism wants to attain these ends by private enterprise and initiative, subject to the supremacy of the public’s buying and abstention from buying on the market. The socialists want to substitute the unique plan of a central authority for the plans of the various individuals. They want to put in place of what Marx called the “anarchy of production” the exclusive monopoly of the government. The antagonism does not refer to the mode of distributing a fixed amount of amenities. It refers to the mode of producing all those goods which people want to enjoy.

The conflict of the two principles is irreconcilable and does not allow for any compromise. Control is indivisible. Either the consumers’ demand as manifested on the market decides for what purposes and how the factors of production should be employed, or the government takes care of these matters. There is nothing that could mitigate the opposition between these two contradictory principles. They preclude each other. Interventionism is not a golden mean between capitalism and socialism. It is the design of a third system of society’s economic organization and must be appreciated as such.

3. How Interventionism Works

It is not the task of today’s discussion to raise any questions about the merits either of capitalism or of socialism. I am dealing today with interventionism alone. And I do not intend to enter into an arbitrary evaluation of interventionism from any preconceived point of view. My only concern is to show how interventionism works and whether or not it can be considered as a pattern of a permanent system for society’s economic organization.

The interventionists emphasize that they plan to retain private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship and market exchange. But, they go on to say, it is peremptory to prevent these capitalist institutions from spreading havoc and unfairly exploiting the majority of people. It is the duty of government to restrain, by orders and prohibitions, the greed of the propertied classes lest their acquisitiveness harm the poorer classes. Unhampered or laissez-faire capitalism is an evil. But in order to eliminate its evils, there is no need to abolish capitalism entirely. It is possible to improve the capitalist system by government interference with the actions of the capitalists and entrepreneurs. Such government regulation and regimentation of business is the only method to keep off totalitarian socialism and to salvage those features of capitalism which are worth preserving.

On the ground of this philosophy, the interventionists advocate a galaxy of various measures. Let us pick out one of them, the very popular scheme of price control.

4. How Price Control Leads to Socialism

The government believes that the price of a definite commodity, e.g., milk, is too high. It wants to make it possible for the poor to give their children more milk. Thus it resorts to a price ceiling and fixes the price of milk at a lower rate than that prevailing on the free market. The result is that the marginal producers of milk, those producing at the highest cost, now incur losses. As no individual farmer or businessman can go on producing at a loss, these marginal producers stop producing and selling milk on the market. They will use their cows and their skill for other more profitable purposes. They will, for example, produce butter, cheese or meat. There will be less milk available for the consumers, not more.

This, or course, is contrary to the intentions of the government. It wanted to make it easier for some people to buy more milk. But, as an outcome of its interference, the supply available drops. The measure proves abortive from the very point of view of the government and the groups it was eager to favor. It brings about a state of affairs, which again, from the point of view of the government, is even less desirable than the previous state of affairs which it was designed to improve.

Now, the government is faced with an alternative. It can abrogate its decree and refrain from any further endeavors to control the price of milk. But if it insists upon its intention to
keep the price of milk below the rate the unhampered market would have determined and wants nonetheless to avoid a drop in the supply of milk, it must try to eliminate the causes
that render the marginal producers’ business unremunerative.

It must add to the first decree concerning only the price of milk a second decree fixing the prices of the factors of production necessary for the production of milk at such a low rate that the marginal producers of milk will no longer suffer losses and will therefore abstain from restricting output. But then the same story repeats itself on a remoter plane. The
supply of the factors of production required for the production of milk drops, and again the government is back where it started. If it does not want to admit defeat and to abstain from any meddling with prices, it must push further and fix the prices of those factors of production which are needed for the production of the factors necessary for the production of milk. Thus the government is forced to go further and further, fixing step by step the prices of all consumers’ goods and of all factors of production, both human, i.e., labor, and material, and to order every entrepreneur and every worker to continue work at these
prices and wages.

No branch of industry can be omitted from this all-round fixing of prices and wages and from this obligation to produce those quantities which the government wants to see produced. If some branches were to be left free out of regard for the fact that they produce only goods qualified as non-vital or even as luxuries, capital and labor would tend to flow into them and the result would be a drop in the supply of those goods, the prices of which government has fixed precisely because it considers them as indispensable for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. But when this state of all-round control of business is attained, there can no longer be any question of a market economy. No longer do the citizens by their buying and abstention from buying determine what should be produced and how.

The power to decide these matters has devolved upon the government. This is no longer capitalism; it is all-round planning by the government, it is socialism.

Please read the rest of this brief but edifying essay here.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air (Thomas Gray “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”).

She works in a diner called the Desert Rose on the northwestern edge of Colorado, near the Utah border. The diner is small and undistinguished, clean and lit up in an American wasteland. Triangles of cherry sit bleeding in the pie case and honey-yellow flypaper spirals back and forth above the cash register. She grew up in a mountain town, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with all the other small-town girls and boys. She began working when she was in the 11th grade, and she’s not stopped working since. Waiting tables is what she’s done for most of her life. She graduated high school but never matriculated. After school, she drifted; where she lives now is not where she grew up.

By age thirty, she’d already buried two husbands, both miners, one killed in a car crash. No longer young, she is not yet old, and she is pretty still. She’s single. She has two teenage children who love her. She smokes mentholated cigarettes and rents an apartment too small for three, but it’s what she can afford.

There have been other jobs – night auditor, bankteller, housecleaner – but waitressing is the one she always comes back to. There are no special skills in her repertoire, no trade. She’s reasonably well-read, her mind is of a naturally speculative cast. At twilight she invariably feels a sense of sadness creep over her.

Fifty feet behind the Desert Rose, a cluster of cottonwoods grows along the banks of a sloppy canal. They are ancient and massive trees. Wind moves sluggishly through their dusty boughs. Moonlike globes of cotton orbit the bodies of the trees and fall soundlessly into the molecular green water. Sparse grass grows along the desert floor, and the desert stretches off into an intricate horizon. At the end of her shift, she likes to stand at the back porch of the café and listen to the wind sifting softly through the grass. Pretty blue flowers grow among the stalks, and she feels them wasting their sweetness on the desert air. The bone-colored moon rises in the east and fills a small quadrant of the sky, suffusing the clouds with its yellow and sulfurous light.

There are approximately twenty million myths about markets and market capitalism, one of the most common being this:

Markets don’t work well (or are inefficient) when there are negative or positive “externalities.”

Here’s how Tom Palmer, philosopher and economist, bunks that canard:

The mere existence of an externality is no argument for having the state take over some activity or displace private choices. Fashionable clothes and good grooming generate plenty of positive externalities, as others admire those who are well clothed or groomed, but that’s no reason to turn choice of or provision of clothing and grooming over to the state. Gardening, architecture, and many other activities generate positive externalities on others, but people undertake to beautify their gardens and their building just the same. In all those cases, the benefits to the producers alone — including the approbations of those on whom the positive externalities are showered — are sufficient to induce them to produce the goods. In other cases, such as the provision of television and radio broadcasts, the public good is “tied” to the provision of other goods, such as advertising for firms….

More commonly, however, it is the existence of NEGATIVE externalities that leads people to question the efficacy or justice of market mechanisms. Pollution is the most commonly cited example. If a producer can produce products profitably because he or she imposes the costs of production on others who have not consented to be a part of the production process, say, by throwing huge amounts of smoke into the air or chemicals into a river, he will probably do so. Those who breathe the air or drink the toxic water will bear the costs of producing the product, while the producer will get the benefits from the sale of the product. The problem in such cases, however, is not that markets have failed, but that they are absent. Markets rest on private property and cannot function when property rights are not defined or enforced. Cases of pollution are precisely cases not of market failure but of government failure to define and defend the property rights of others, such as those who breathe polluted air, or drink polluted water (source).

Under true laissez-faire capitalism, in other words, which is the only system that fully protects property and person — thereby forbidding the instigation of force in any form — you are not allowed to poison anyone.

In a socialistic, protectionist society, such as the one we now live in, no such rule of law exists because property is not regarded as private but communal.

The proof is ultimately in the water.

When portable radios first appeared in American stores, the average American worker had to labor 13 hours to buy one; today he or she toils for about 1 hour.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the average American family spent three-quarters of its income on food, clothing, and shelter; today it spends about one-third on those items, and spends and even greater proportion on taxes (source).

That principle is the exact principle whereby capitalism enriches any and every society that implements it.

The insidious myth that capitalism “exploits the workers” while a few capitalist pigs get rich at the workers’ expense is a canard that’s been bunked a billion times.

But there’s even more:

Electric light was first deployed along Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan in 1882, powered by America’s first commercial electric grid. Electric lighting initially cost much more than gas lighting (the dominant form of lighting at the time) and was available only to multi-millionaire JP Morgan and a handful of businesses in New York’s financial district. By 1932, however, the price of electricity had fallen to one-third its former level, and 70 percent of Americans had electricity. Within fifty years of Edison introducing the electric grid, gas light was all but forgotten, and electricity emerged as the power source for the masses. Electricity not only provided clean, odorless, and safe lighting compared to its predecessor; it also powered refrigerators, fans, heaters, irons, and ovens, and it quickly became the dominant source of motive power in factories (source).

Capitalism lowers the cost of every new technology. It does so by taking products — cars, cotton, electricity, phones, computers, it doesn’t matter — and through constant innovation and the ingenuity that free markets foster, mass producing these items, which lowers and lowers the costs. That is why in this country even those below the poverty level own televisions, phones, microwaves, toasters, and so on. That is why no one starves to death in the United States.

The locus of wealth is production and free exchange. The locus of production and free exchange is private property. And that is why private property is the most important ingredient to capitalism.

Consider that government cannot redistribute or spend a single penny without first either taxing, borrowing, or printing, all three of which deplete real wealth. In this way, government intervention, in any of its multifarious forms, is by definition self-defeating: It can only end in wealth destruction. It’s also why labor unions cannot, over the long run, increase real wages and living standards, and only advances in technology can.

“Historically, real wages (wages adjusted for the effects of inflation) rose at about 2 percent per year before the advent of unions, and at a similar rate afterward” (Morgan Reynolds, Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America, 1984).

Says Dr. Dilorezo:

If labor unions were responsible for the historical rise in wages, then the solution to world poverty would be self-evident: unionize all the poorest nations on earth. [And yet] private-sector unions reached their peak in terms of membership in the 1950s, when they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, they represent barely 10 percent of the private-sector workforce. All during this time of declining union memberships, influence, and power, wages and living standards have risen substantially. All of the ‘declining industries’ in America from the 1970s on tended to be the highly unionized ones, whereas the growing industries, especially in the high-technology fields, are almost exclusively nonunion. At best, unions can improve the standards of living of some of their members, but only at the expense of other, nonunion workers, consumers, and others. When unions use their power to go on strike, or threaten to strike, and succeed in increasing their members’ wages above what they could earn on the free market, they inevitably cause some union members to lose their jobs.

The reason? When wages rise, it makes labor more costly; therefore, to keep turning a profit, employers simply cannot employ as many workers.

The following is from Chapter 30 of my book Leave Us Alone — A Capitalist Credo:

The Russian writer Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in what is now the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. At that time, Berdichev was still part of the Russian Empire. Vasily Grossman attended high school in Kiev and then the University of Moscow. He graduated from University in 1929 with a degree in chemical engineering. He worked as an engineer for five years, after which time he devoted himself entirely to writing.

He published his first news article in 1928, his first fictional story in 1934.

During the middle and latter 1930’s Vasily Grossman was exceptionally prolific, and even more so after the start of World War II. At that point he became a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda). He spent the entire war on the treacherous front, covering, in minute detail, the blood-soaked siege of Stalingrad. In popularity his war reportage was second to none (well, maybe one: the famous Ehrenburg), and Grossman is loosely portrayed by actor Joseph Fiennes in the inaccurate movie Enemy at the Gates.

In his youth and well into his thirties, Vasily Grossman was devoted to the communist philosophy. But during and immediately after the war, he became increasingly disillusioned with that socialist system, so that, starting in 1943, he began explicitly challenging the whole Soviet ideal — both for its repression of freedom and for its anti-Semitism.

His war fiction at this time also began to generate criticism from high Soviet officials. In a matter of months, thus, his writings were suppressed. Over the course of his latter years, Vasily Grossman became an outright opponent of socialism. His writings are, at times, not consistently, among the most eloquent expression of freedom of any person in any era.

Stomach cancer killed him in 1964.

What follows is a short passage from his last novel Forever Flowing. It is one side of a brief dialogue spoken, in part, by the novel’s protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich, who after thirty years of imprisonment has just been released from the Russian Gulag. I quote it as a tribute to freedom, to be sure, but also as a tribute to the man who came to understand the philosophical roots of freedom — and that in a country where freedom was not allowed; in a country where philosophies and freedom were replaced by blind obedience and dogma. It’s important that people like Vasily Grossman are not forgotten.
Please think of the following passage the next time you hear an environmentalist talk about more centralized government and more government ownership of land for the sake of “our endangered environment.”

Please think of it next time you see someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt (or necklace) in glorification of Che Guevara’s communistic ideals, or romanticizing communist Cuba and Castro for their healthcare system, or Chairman Mao with the blood of billions on his hands:

I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.

Forever Flowing

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964)