Response To Post On Socialism, Free Enterprise and Greed.
This is a response never posted from an older discussion.
https://aboutanancientenquiry.tumblr.com/
"I find [Milton] Friedman’s excerpt that you quote rather hypocritical. Capitalism is not mainly about the pursuit of the interests of “the scientist, the philanthropist, and the missionary”. It is mainly about the pursuit of the personal egoistic and material interest and of the accumulation of capital and wealth"
"More generally, your thesis is that every imaginable form of socialism (and it seems that, like most American conservatives, you include in this term even versions of mixed/pluralist economy) would lead inevitably to overconcentration of power, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and domination of the society by a few autocrats. But you don’t offer any arguments for this thesis of yours.
philosophicalconservatism.com
A Free Enterprise system is based upon human beings pursuing their own individual interests. Human interests are not purely material and therefore neither is what they pursue (except perhaps to the Marxist who embraces economic determinism). The economist Ludwig Von Mises once stated that to say that because human beings must pursue their various ends by economic means that all of their ends are economic/material is as foolish as saying that because human beings must travel about on two legs, they never go anywhere except to buy stockings and shoes. I agree with him. Also, a Free Enterprise society does not have an "objective". A Free Enterprise scenario merely leaves men free to form whatever contracts with one another they like (in the same way that men are left free in other spheres). Now we can observe and evaluate the processes that emerge out of allowing this liberty, but those processes are not some imposed plan for the society.
The use to which wealth is put is the best evidence for what motivated its creation within a given society. The use of wealth in a Free Enterprise society like America absolutely encompasses everything described in Friedman's original quote. America's impact in every single one of those spheres has been enormous, and in certain respects unprecedented.
Now before we critique the model of Socialism described in your full message, on any other level (a model of employee owned business firms functioning in their own market) one should deal with the basic presumption behind it. That presumption is that the modern worker is somehow deprived of the true value of his labor in a free market economy. This argument, widely popularized by Marx, suffers from at least two fatal flaws. The first is discussed in a classic post from this blog on the following link. The second flaw is: the modern refutability of the famous Marxist claim that "Capital is dead labor". It is the technology of the contemporary age that has fully exposed the falsehood of this claim, and more specifically, the phenomenon known as automation. The idea that the business owner's handling of capital adds nothing essential to the continuing productivity of the business, and that the owner entirely skates by on the backs and the labor of the workers was incorrect, but perhaps plausible as long as the workers were always an indispensable ingredient.
But a modern business owner who automates his services invests in capital that unquestionably does not "die" for it clearly continues to yield value in and of itself. There can be no dissembling about how value is produced in this instance because the worker is not even present. And this case elucidates the others. For it follows logically that if the wise allocation of capital can be responsible for 100% of the value produced by a company in one case, it can be responsible for 80% or 70% of that value in other cases (for example where there is slightly less efficient machinery that does require some human operation). This brings us to our second point: the business owner is not a passive holder of capital but is in fact a talented allocator of capital. And this becomes increasingly the case as markets become more dynamic and unpredictable in the modern age. That is the basis of his compensation.
So I don't think the case has been made for an actual injustice here. There is a general contradiction that the Leftist indulges in here that I have pointed out many times before. On the one hand he contends that "Capitalism" coldly reduces everything to a matter of dollars and cents; to economic efficiency. On the other hand, he argues that corporate board members have a fetish for finding and hiring executives that they can unnecessarily overcompensate with billions of dollars in company money for doing virtually nothing. It doesn't add up. Also, I don't think that the burden of proof is on the defender of the Free Enterprise system to show that a system [Socialism] that has only ever functioned by authoritarian mechanisms in the real world can't function in any other way. It is up to the Socialist to show that it can.
The Conservative is not criticizing pure philosophers engaged in abstract speculation about what may one day be. He is criticizing political advocates that call out for the immediate overthrow of an allegedly exploitative Capitalist system" without having so much as a refined blueprint of what they intend to replace it with.
