Capitalism v the Free Market

Before I make this post, I want to point out that I find SteemIt to be one of the worst publishing platforms that I have encountered on the Internet.

SteemIt assumes that each post must be a fully contained article.

What I wanted to put together an argument that began by defining terms. I would then link my defined terms together to say something that could be helpful for people trying to defend the American ideals of liberty.

One can't develop an article that links several articles together. It is infuriating.

In an earlier post I pointed out a historical oddity. It appears that Karl Marx was the father of the ideology called "capitalism."

I grew up believing that "capitalism" was just a fancy political name for the free market, but on studying the etymology of the term I kept coming to a book called "Das Kapital."

The ideology that Marx presents in "Das Kapital" is radically different from the ideals one associates with free markets.

Classical economics is a rather dry study of finances influenced largely by Pacioli's system of double entry accounting. In classical economics, capital is simply one part of the means of production.

I have used the term "classical liberal" in past articles. I define classical liberal as the application of classical logic to the question of liberty. There is a wonderful tradition of philosophers, stretching back to antiquity, who spoke about the nature of man and man's relation to society. The tradition often focused on spiritual matters, ethical concerns and civics.

A central focus of classical liberal economics is how man interfaces with the world. The central feature of this discussion is property rights.

Classical liberals use the word property as a synonym for ownership. It is likely that you own the computer that you are using to view this post. Because you own the computer you have say so over the pages you view with your computer.

If you are a member of SteemIt, you have say so of your account and can upvote this post.

In the classical liberal view, property rights are vital because it is through property rights that people have a moral authority to act in the world.

If you don't have rights to the computer you are using and you don't have rights to the account you are using on Steem then you lack the ability to interact with the world.

Think about your next meal. Property rights, aka ownership, is the principle that gives you the authority to take that food, put it in your mouth and eat it. If you do not have rights to the food you plan on eating; then you are thief. You are stealing the food.

BTW, poverty is a situation in which people own very little. The way to eleviate poverty is to organize society so that everyone gets to own some stuff.

Marx was twit. Marx was under the thrall of Hegel and Schopenhauer. Marx decided that he wanted to be the uberman who started the next great revolution. To do this Marx, wrote a dense three volume work called "Das Kapital." In this work the ruling class developed a corrupt financial system that they used to capture and consolidate the ownership of capital into a very small number of corruptible hands.

The people, forced into poverty, would rebel against this system and create a Utopian state called Communism. Communism would strip everyone of their property rights but since all people were in the same dire straights people would be overcome by altruism and share the bounties of the world.

Das Kapital, the founding document of capitalism, provides a formula that the ruling class can use to consolidate the control of capital.

So, Marx's capitalism is a wild-eyed, materialistic approach to discussing economics that over-emphasizes capital.

In my opinion the best path to undoing the damage that Marx wrought on this planet is to call him out and point out that Capitalism was the creation of the enemies of liberty. We then need to revive classical liberal arguments about the relation of man to the community.

Unfortunately, I can't do this on SteemIt because I would need to be able to do thinks like put Marx's ideas in one column and compare them to classical liberal ideas in the next.

So I will end this post in frustration.

I was going to add a background to the image used for this post. But why should I waste two hours creating an image when I will only get three cents for this post?