Capitalism gets a lot of hate.
I expect it from the left. They blame free markets for racism, “horrifying inequality,” and even, according to economist Joseph Stiglitz, “accelerating climate change.”
People on the right generally defend capitalism, but today, a growing number agree with the left.
In my new video, author James Lindsay says, “They make the exact same arguments that we’ve heard for decades: ‘capitalism has made everything about the dollar. Everything’s about [gross domestic product]…you lose everything that really matters, like kinship and nation and identity.'”
Tucker Carlson, whom Lindsay calls “woke right,” praises Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D–Mass.) economic programs, saying they “make obvious sense.”
“Astonishing!” says Lindsay. “Warren put forth something called the ‘Accountable Capitalism Act,’ which was going to restrain the way that corporations are able to behave under the brand name of ‘accountability.'”
Even Vice President J.D. Vance attacks free trade.
“While the government shouldn’t be controlling the American economy,” he said “we should…put a little bit of a thumb on the scale…protect nascent industries from foreign competition.”
“[This] is just another way of saying, ‘your company got too big, so we need to take some of your property and distribute it further down the chain,'” says Lindsay. “[Vance is] very against large multinational corporations and the things that they do and wants to limit them.”
But why? Large companies get large mostly by doing things right. Businesses don’t make profits unless they please their customers.
Look at places that mostly embrace free markets: the United States, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Hong Kong (until China’s government clamped down). These are good places to live. People prosper when markets are free.
“It works!” says Lindsay. “When you have free people who can engage freely with one another and trade…you actually have a rising of all ships. Because what you have is a people who are free to do with their things as they will. They, therefore, can implement their stuff, their money, their resources, their talents, whatever they happen to be, to solve problems for other people. And when you solve a problem for other people, even if it’s a kind of silly thing, like entertaining them with a silly game on their phone, when you solve a problem for other people, they’ll give you money for it in exchange.”
Exactly. Trade is win-win. Otherwise, we wouldn’t engage in it.
So it puzzles me that as markets continue to lift more people out of poverty, capitalism faces more attacks, even from the right.
“The problem,” says Lindsay, is “it requires people to be free….You can’t control people who are free.…So we need to have a government system to tell them to do the right thing in the name of the common good. That’s the mentality.”
Lindsay even hoaxed a conservative magazine, American Reformer, into publishing part of The Communist Manifesto, merely by substituting Christian nationalist language for words like “proletariat.”
When the editors learned that they’d been tricked, they left the article up, saying it was “a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.”
Yikes.
Government-managed trade, protection for politically connected industries, state promotion of Christianity, speech restrictions, morality laws, state-owned industry, cronyism—these are bad ideas, no matter which side sells them.
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