Imperfections

     Among the things that tire me most severely are comments to the effect that this, that, or the other thing “isn’t perfect.” Given the general lack of understanding of what constitutes “perfection,” I’m tempted to launch into a lecture about the speaker’s choice of words and the failure of comprehension they reveal. But in these later years of life, I restrain myself, so as not to add to my already unfortunate “body count.”

     One observation, pithily phrased by the late, great C. Northcote Parkinson, puts the whole subject to bed:

     Perfection is finality, and finality is death.

     It seems that too few persons are sufficiently acquainted with the Great Lawgiver to have encountered that one, so here we are.

     Just this morning – yes, I know it’s early – a French commenter at X, in the midst of a spirited defense of market capitalism, said this:

     Market capitalism isn’t perfect.

     That lit my boiler, and moved me to resurrect the following piece from 2015. But don’t hurry away if you remember it, for I have a trailing comment to make.

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     No doubt every Gentle Reader has encountered, at least, someone who constantly and vociferously denounces the status quo for some perceived flaw. Such a person will be known to complain constantly about his personal lot in life, as well. It won’t matter how well off he is, or how well supplied with friends, lovers, opportunities, or comforts. The comparison of his situation to that of far less fortunate others will not affect his malaise. Anything he perceives as a defect, whether in his circumstances or “The System,” will be enough.

     To which the recently deceased Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, he of the ten World Series rings and endless records, deposeth and sayeth:

     If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

     Many people have chuckled over Berra’s supposed malapropisms, thinking only that the Yankee great had intended to say something plain and obvious, but that it was muddled by his low facility with the English language. For my part, I find an immense practical wisdom in many of them. The above is a case in point.

     There are two piercing insights to be had here. The first is the more general of the two. That which is perfect is finished, complete, at the terminus of its evolution. It cannot be improved. It requires no changes. Indeed, it tolerates no changes, for any change rendered to a perfect thing or context would destroy its perfection.

     Therefore, if “the world” were perfect, it would deny Man any latitude for action. Any sort of change at all would deface it. Since Man, as Loren Lomasky has put it, is a “project pursuer,” a “perfect world” would destroy a fundamental requirement of human life: opportunities for action in pursuit of improvements to oneself or one’s condition. A “perfect world” would find Man intolerable. We would shortly be extinct.

     The second insight is more personal. It’s highly unlikely that any two persons would agree on what constitutes a “perfect world.” Our personal priorities and preferences vary too greatly for that. Indeed, for some of us, “perfection” equates to absolute hegemony over others. But what of the others? Are they to be allowed no say in the matter?

     The old pastimes “What would you do with a billion dollars?” – yes, it used to be a million, but prices are higher these days – and “What would you do if you were king?” cast additional light on Berra’s truth. Your billion would not be mine; your monarchy would limit my sphere of action. Your use of either of those things would deprive me of something I value: in the first case, the ability to afford whatever pleasure or luxury you’ve gobbled up, thus raising the price above my means; in the second, the freedom to live and act as I see fit, without a requirement for anyone’s permission or approval.

     And so, if “the world,’ however conceived, were “perfect,” however conceived, it wouldn’t be. Quod erat demonstrandum.

     I find it fitting that such wisdoms should have come from Yogi. Perhaps the American Philosophical Society should confer an emeritus membership upon him. By the way, does anyone know when they hold the balloting for the Philosophy Hall Of Fame?

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     A nice trip down Memory Lane, wouldn’t you say, Gentle Reader? But wait: there’s more! For we see defenders of the free market say it “isn’t perfect” with appalling frequency. That raises two questions:

1. Why do they do it?
2. What usually follows?

     The answer to the first question is that the speaker feels compelled to admit that free markets don’t solve all the problems of the world. Now, if you’re of a rational but sarcastic bent, as is your humble Curmudgeon, you might say “Well, what would?” But that is exactly what the Leftist dueling with you wants you to say. He has this “solution,” you see…

     That’s the answer to the second question. Admitting that there are imperfections in the world provides an entering wedge the Leftist can use to go on the attack. The Left strives always to be on the attack. (Note how vituperative Leftists become when forced onto the defense.) Any admission by a Rightist that there are “problems” gives him an opportunity to mount an offensive against “the System.”

     Never mind that the Left’s prescriptions have always produced poverty, oppression, and hopelessness. Leftists don’t want to address the record of socialist and communist systems. Force them to do so and their mildest rejoinder will be to call you “heartless.” (That usually follows their perennial deflection: “That wasn’t real socialism.”) Their whole aim is to attack freedom’s “imperfections” and claim that they can be remedied by their methods.

     Don’t fall into their trap. Free markets don’t exist to fulfill Utopian objectives. They can’t; nothing can. The existence of marginal people, less well off than the rest of us, does not indict capitalism. Nothing but copious charity could raise their lot to that of an American middle-class wage earner… and we have learned the limits of large-scale charity:

     We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism, for as is often said, we can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for. – Thomas Mackay, Methods of Social Reform

     So have done with the “capitalism isn’t perfect” crap.

The Form Of Our Destructor

     Many look; far fewer actually see.

     I’m going to do a terrible thing here: I’m going to quote from an explicitly Marxist website:

     [T]he oppression of women, their marginalisation within society, and the repression of their sexual behaviour emerged, reducing them to mere instruments of reproduction (caring for the household and children), and became structural and embedded historically, together with the evolution of various family and social structures. Attitudes towards sexual behaviour that falls outside of reproduction within the monogamous family, on the other hand, depends on how much they are considered as a threat to the family as an institution. Homosexual love between women has been subject to varying degrees of repression at different periods in history (we have only mentioned a few above). We can argue, however, that as long as the monogamous family is considered the fundamental cornerstone of society and the only model for legitimate emotional and sexual behaviour, it will be impossible to overcome social discrimination based on sexual orientations.

     The struggle against sexual discrimination is linked to the struggle against class society in general for several reasons. The first, as we have explained, is that only the abolition of class society can create the material economic basis and cultural drive sufficient to dismantle the model of the monogamous family as the only basic unit of society.

     Note the title of that scrofulous essay: “LGBT: Liberation and Revolution.” Then proceed to this even more strident one:

     Arguably the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the “abolition of the family.” The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers, where women became little more than “instruments of production” for the men who lorded over them. Radical queer politics in the 1960s and ’70s added to their critique of the bourgeois family when activists challenged the heteronormativity of familial relations….

     It’s a central idea to feminism anyway, that mothers aren’t natural entities; they’re making choices to look after this other person. It’s not some sort of mechanical, automatic process; it’s a practice of grounding sociality. Mothers nurture, but they also kill and abuse their wards. That’s why it’s so valuable to denaturalize the mother-child bond. To do anything otherwise is to devalue that work. That’s the horizon that I think opens up the space for a revolutionary politics.

     Again, note the title: “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”

     Any problems tracing the common thread here, Gentle Reader?

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     The “thinking” exemplified above has been going on for a very long time. Every Communist regime has labored like Hercules to undermine and destroy family bonds. Communists have targeted virtually every institution that families participate in together, seeking to outlaw it if they couldn’t “denaturalize” it. They’ve had their successes, despite the power of family attachments and parental love. Many of those successes have arisen from economic pressures. We’ve seen a fair amount of that in these United States, as the two-income family gradually supersedes the older one-income model as the norm.

     Yes, unrestricted abortion is part of it, but that’s the fish-in-a-barrel class. More subtle, and therefore far more threatening, is the combination of predatory taxation, persistent inflation, the “war between the sexes,” careerism among women, the consequent diminution of family sizes, and the proliferation of “day care” institutions, some of which reach all the way to early infancy.

     No doubt there are several reasons the Powers That Be have encouraged those developments. In his excellent and ominous first novel The Hidden Truth, Hans G. Schantz outlined a “game plan” that combines them into a sinister paradigm. The pattern is so similar to the economic, social, and political developments in post-World-War-II Western societies that only the willfully blind could miss it. The more recent promotion, almost entirely by the Left, of non-reproductive, family-averse behaviors such as homosexuality and transgenderism fits into the pattern very well. While there are conservatively inclined, family oriented gays and transgenders, they’re a small (but brave) minority. Moreover, they get no breaks from Nature; they must struggle with the clash between their yearnings for family and their other desires.

     Patterns matter. Even those that ultimately prove to have formed out of sheer coincidence should be studied as closely as human intellect permits. Considering that, as Arne Stromberg has said, the family is the essential building block of every stable society, this is a pattern that deserves the closest scrutiny:

     “Families are the fundamental building blocks of a stable society. Extended families -- clans -- are the best conceivable environment for the rearing of children, the perpetuation of a commercial forte, and the germination of new families and their ventures. A clan like yours, Miss Albermayer, conserves a brilliant genetic line and a priceless medical specialty at the same time. A clan like yours, Mr. Morelon, makes possible a benign agricultural empire and produces natural leaders one after another while connecting Hope to its most distant origins. And all healthy families, which cherish life and bind their members to one another in unembarrassed love, can find far more to occupy and amuse them than they need.

     “When Earth's regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them. That's my thesis, for what it's worth.”

     Ponder well, Gentle Reader.

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     One more thought before I close for today: the articles I cited in the first segment are both explicit about their animosity toward free market economics, a.k.a. capitalism. Their hostility toward the family is instrumental: it is intended to be principally a stroke against capitalism. This reveals them to be users of the homosexual and transgender communities. They are not allies from conviction but exploiters of those communities, in the belief that their enlargement would assist in the destruction of capitalism. Is their belief correct?

     I think it is. Family bonds and obligations provide good men the most powerful of all incentives to be producers and earners. Were those incentives to be subtracted, a great deal of the fuel would be removed from the economic engines of capitalist societies. Note that this is observably the case in those nations where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels: e.g., Japan, Russia, and the entire continent of Europe.

     Yet I have also said (and I continue to believe) that it is virtually impossible to get people to reproduce for the sake of a future they don’t expect to see. People in First World societies who have children do so for the sake of having children; no other desire participates. The demotion of children from an economic asset to a luxury good forces them to compete with other luxury goods – and children have been losing that competition for decades now.

     Food for thought.

A New Rationale Every Day

     “Give up your freedom!” the Left shrieks. “Let the State make all your decisions for you!” It’s lunacy, of course. Lunacy with an ever-changing rationale, to be sure. But the prescription is always the same: eliminate capitalism in favor of larger and more powerful government. Here’s an article that lays it out plainly:

     Enter Dr. Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics, a man on a crusade to end "the tyranny of GDP."

     In an interview for BBC's Newsnight show on Thursday, Hickel called for "degrowth." Ignoring energy innovation in fracking, nuclear power, renewables, and battery-based power systems, Hickel claimed that Earth is running out of resources. Rich nations are apparently to blame because we "use three times our fair share of bio-capacity."

     Hickel then claims that degrowth is not the same as "austerity" (reduced government spending). Instead, he says, "the goal is to increase human well-being and happiness while reducing our economic footprint."

     That’s only 106 words. (About “0.1 pictures.”) But what a picture it paints! It helps, of course, if the reader can see the implications of a program of “degrowth.”

     Let’s start with this one: How does it come about? For individuals, following their natural desires to be better (not worse) off, will naturally strive to produce more (not less). So the only route toward “degrowth” is coercion: the heavy hand of an Omnipotent State.

     The rationale is the currently fashionable one about “running out of resources.” It’s never been plainer that this is false. The prices of natural resources of every sort have been falling. We’re better at natural resource exploitation, conservation, and recapture than ever before in history. Scarcity is measured better by price than by any other metric.

     Hickel’s nonsense about increasing “human well-being and happiness” is merely camouflage. There’s no causal connection between making people poorer and increasing their well-being. The reverse is quite plainly true: making people poorer results in a decline in their well-being. If you don’t believe me, ask the Venezuelans.

     What else did this obvious government-worshipper have to say about his program?

• "Cut excess consumption by curbing advertising and taxing carbon."
• "Introducing a basic income and a shorter working week would allow us to get rid of unnecessary jobs."
• "Industrialized countries will have no choice but to downscale their economic activity by 4-6 percent per year. And poor countries are going to have to follow suit after 2025, downscaling by about 3 percent per year."

     The question such ultra-statists never face is quite simple: “What if you’re wrong? What then?” Whether that’s because they’ve made it a precondition that no such question be asked of them or because their interviewers are pusillanimous poltroons, it’s never raised. Coercive utopians have never been able to face it. They can’t be wrong; it’s an article of faith.

     But this is nothing new.

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     Consider this snippet from For A New Liberty, by the late Dr. Murray Rothbard:

     Left-liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold. In the last three or four decades [Dr. Rothbard published this in 1973], not a very long time in human history, they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free market capitalism. The curious thing is that each of these complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors. But contradictory complaints by liberal intellectuals do not seem to faze them or serve to abate their petulance—even though it is often the very same intellectuals who are reversing themselves so rapidly. And these reversals seem to make no dent whatever in their self-righteousness or in the self-confidence of their position.

     Dr. Rothbard goes on to catalogue seven successive Leftist demands for greatly increased government power over the American economy: each with its own specious rationale, wholly disconnected from the rationale that preceded it:

1. Secular stagnation in the late 1930s and 1940s;
2. Insufficient economic growth in the early 1950s;
3. Excessive affluence in 1958 (cf. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society);
4. Increasing poverty in the early 1960s; (cf. Harrington’s The Other America);
5. The “automation crisis” in the mid 1960s;
6. Pollution in the later 1960s;
7. Exhaustion of resources in the 1970s and beyond.

     The malady changes, but the remedy remains the same: Capitalism and private property must be abolished. Quoth Joseph Schumpeter:

     Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.

     Considering that capitalism – the system of free people producing and trading in a free market – is the only economic scheme that’s done anything to improve human well-being and happiness, we must ask: Why is the Left so implacably hostile to it?

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     This is not a new subject for me. I’ve ranted about it on occasions beyond counting. What brings it to mind afresh is not some recent change in the Left’s arguments against capitalism. The arguments enumerated above seem to have exhausted their ingenuity. Rather, it’s about the Left’s recent descent to violence.

     When a miscreant is determined to have his way, but he’s become convinced that he can’t get it by peaceful means – i.e., reason, evidence, victories at the ballot box – he’ll recur to seedier methods. He’ll usually start with deceit. If deceit proves insufficient, he’ll try fraud next. But if he can neither lie nor cheat his way to his goal, he’ll consider violence.

     Violence as a political tactic works when it’s not vigorously opposed. I’m not talking about what we might call “normal violence,” the sort the police and justice system exist to deter. I’m talking about large mobs of violent thugs, sufficiently numerous to overwhelm normal police forces.

     The Left’s embrace of AntiFa makes it plain that the critical battle for the soul of these United States is at hand. They’ve failed to persuade a majority of Americans that their nostrums are right for us. They’ve cheated their way to several Congressional and Senatorial seats, but haven’t managed to achieve a majority that way either. Other fraudulent tactics have proved no more useful to them. Violence is their sole remaining weapon.

     A political movement that chooses violence has “crossed the Rubicon.” If it doesn’t win, it will be exterminated. The Left’s strategists know this. Therefore, knowing that to lose is to lose everything, they will go “all in.”

     A rational man must ask why. What makes the risk seem worthwhile to them? Considering that the majority of Americans are happy with capitalism and don’t want to see it replaced by a socialist system, the Left’s masters must know that the odds are against them. Why not accept being the “loyal opposition” for a generation or two, and live to press its case some other day?

     The only plausible explanation is hatred. But it’s not quite plausible enough.

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     Hatred attains its greatest intensity when it’s conceptualized in personal terms. That is, the hater must conceive of his target as a conscious entity that is doing him harm, or seeking to do so. It’s far easier to inflame oneself with hatred of Smith than with hatred of an abstraction such as capitalism. So how did we get here? How did we reach a point at which large masses of people – mostly young people – are willing to risk unlimited harm to themselves for the chance to suppress the views and associations of peaceable strangers?

     Perhaps if we knew the answer, we might find an antidote. But answers are lacking at the moment. All we have is video clips of thugs smashing windows, setting fires, and attacking peaceable conservatives and Republicans. We infer their hatred without being able to explain it – and owing to the many flip-flops their pseudo-intellectuals have committed, none of their rationales will hold water.

     It might be a consequence of the numbers involved. When millions of people are engaged in discourse over a political or economic subject, some will be more passionate than others. Perhaps the numbers are large enough to provide for a few thousand conscienceless, utterly violent souls willing to do harm to others in the name of their passion.

     But their absolute, unreasoning antipathy to capitalism still requires an explanation, and I don’t have one.

     Thoughts?

“Blind Squirrels”

     Are you familiar with the old maxim “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then?” It’s an old bit of folk wisdom, which indirectly exhorts us not to judge the accuracy of an observation by the identity of him who made it. It remains as wise a guide as ever.

     However, the blind squirrel species – i.e., he who can’t see what’s before him, and so must grope blindly to achieve his aims – is not undifferentiated. Some blind squirrels are stupid. Some are merely uninformed. And some, perhaps the most troubling of the species, are highly intelligent, highly erudite men who, because they’re blinded by the aim at the forefront of their thoughts, can’t...quite...grasp a critical fact. Such squirrels provide an invaluable illustration of the inverse of the old maxim: that one mustn’t automatically accept a pronouncement as accurate simply because it comes from a respected source.

     Today’s example arrives from the pixels of the Washington Times, in a brief article by two highly intelligent, highly erudite men:

     After proposing $1 trillion investment into infrastructure, the Trump administration is harnessing the brainpower of renowned experts to unlock the insoluble problem of how many jobs will be created for each billion dollars of spending. While stressing the obvious, the administration is missing the important point.

     The purpose of capitalism is not job creation. The purpose of the capitalist economy is to create wealth. Employment and the subsequent distribution of the spoils of an economy are byproducts of capitalism.

     Contemplate those two paragraphs for a moment. Can you find any problems in them? Any deviations from your understanding of capitalism? Wait, hold hard there: Just what is capitalism? Have you ever read or heard a definition of the term? Could you state it concisely for the rest of my Gentle Readers?

     Not an easy assignment, is it?

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     The great Thomas Sowell, in his book The Vision of the Anointed, made an important point about the law: We private citizens form our interpretation and evaluation of a proposed law according to the public meanings of the words in its text. We expect our lawmakers to do the same:

     Those who argue for...“judicial restraint” often say that judges should follow the “original intent” of laws in general and the Constitution in particular....Professor Ronald Dworkin, for example, argues against original intent on grounds that ‘mental events” in the minds of legislators or writers of the Constitution are difficult or impossible to discern. But of course, nobody voted on what was in the back of somebody else’s mind. What was enacted into law were the meanings of those words to others—in short, the public meanings of words. As Justice Holmes put it, the relevant question was “not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used....We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statute meant.”

     That words have public meanings is the linchpin of the matter: the great majority of us know what they mean and expect them to be used according to those meanings. In their required courses in straining at gnats and swallowing elephants whole, lawyers learn how to pervert the meanings of words – to twist them into meanings and applications no non-lawyer would ever have imagined – so they can reach their intended aims. That’s one reason why “lawyer” has become a de facto synonym for “devious scoundrel.”

     However, not all words have generally agreed-upon public meanings at any given point in time. Such words often get the Humpty Dumpty treatment:

     'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
     'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
     Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
     'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
     'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
     'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
     'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

     [Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass]

     Capitalism is such a term. Markovsky and London have an intended meaning for it – but not one you and I, Gentle Reader, are guaranteed to accept.

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     Thomas Sowell again:

     Since capitalism was named by its enemies, it is perhaps not surprising that the name is completely misleading. Despite the name, capitalism is not an “ism.” It is not a philosophy but an economy. Ultimately it is nothing more and nothing less than an economy not run by political authorities. There are no capitalist institutions; any number of ways of carrying out economic activities may flourish under “capitalism”—that is, in the absence of control from above. You may get food from a restaurant, or by buying it from the supermarket and cooking it yourself, or by growing the food on your own land and processing it all the way through to the dinner table. Each of these is just as much “capitalism” as the others...They do not define capitalism but are simply one of the innumerable ways of doing things when choices are unconstrained by authorities.
     Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards. Yet no one regards this as making calculus invalid or illegitimate. [Op cit.]

     Markovsky and London would like to encourage a particular attitude toward a feature of this “phase of capitalism:”

     Until recently, only the government could handle projects on the scale of the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system, but now large corporations and investment funds have sufficient resources to build projects on any scale. Hence, there is no imperative for the government — federal, state or local — to finance and maintain modern infrastructure when private capital is available to do the job.

     Privatization of the infrastructure will open a new, multitrillion-dollar frontier for capitalism, and its effect could be massive. It has the potential to create a long-term economic expansion that will dwarf the scale of the Pacific Railroad and National Interstate and Defense Highways acts combined.

     An inspiring vision, to be sure...but how compatible is it with either capitalism or government? Governments enter into these agreements with private corporations with more than one end in view. The first, most obvious one is that a bridge, road, dam, or what-have-you should be built. A second one is that the item shall conform to the State’s dictates, which are usually the subject of a protracted negotiation with the private contractor, to say nothing of a lot of lying about “future intentions” and “future contracts.” A third is that the item should serve the interests of particular persons and institutions...some of which are not named and might never be known.

     Factor in the State’s predictable insistence that only certain lands are available through eminent domain, that only certain unions shall be employed in the work, and that the State shall have absolute hegemony of the item after it’s complete. Does any of that sound like an undertaking in “an economy not run by political authorities” – ?

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     I teetered at the verge of anarchism for decades. Anarchism has some very attractive features. However, after a great deal of reading and hard thought, I was forced to conclude that anarchism shares a critical feature with government: instability:

     I shan’t attempt to deceive or misdirect you: I’m horrified by politics and all its fruits. I consider the use of coercive force against innocent men the greatest of all the evils we know. But I try, most sincerely, to be realistic about the world around us. In that world, peopled by men such as ourselves, anarchism—the complete abjuration and avoidance of the State—is unstable. In time, it will always give way to politics. Hammer it to the earth as many times as you may, you will never succeed in killing it permanently. The State will rise again. [From the Foreword to Freedom’s Fury]

     Many who’ve dabbled in anarchism have sought a compromise in the privatization of various undertakings we’ve routinely deeded to the State. “Public-private partnership” is the term most commonly applied to such compromises: the State decrees a need or a priority, but some private institution is charged with its execution. It sounds nice, but in practice it’s a morally confused, practically unworkable disaster. The State will always contrive to control as many elements of such a “partnership” as possible. Ultimately, whether through contractual agreement or post hoc seizure, it will control all of them.

     Which returns us to the question in the opening segment: What is capitalism? If it’s Thomas Sowell’s conception of “an economy not run by political authorities,” such “partnerships” contradict it. If it’s to embrace Markovsky and London’s calls for privatization, it’s a fraud. Since the word appears to have no generally agreed-upon meaning – pace Sowell, you can thank capitalism’s enemies for that – the question becomes unanswerable in the general setting.

     The purpose of an undefinable thing is as murky as the thing itself. However, we can know this much: individuals operating in freedom act according to their own purposes. In keeping with Ludwig von Mises’s “axiom of action,” those purposes can be generically enumerated:

• Advancement toward a positive outcome (e.g., greater wealth, security, or status; one’s welfare or that of a loved one);
• Averting a foreseen negative outcome (e.g., penury, shame, vulnerability, or harm to self or a loved one).

     Which is why I concur with what Nathaniel Branden told us about an early encounter with Ayn Rand:

     Even though he was considerably older and more mature, Branden was no wiser about economics or the peculiar position of capitalism in the scheme of economic systems. Rand pointed him at a number of books, including Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson and Isabel Paterson's The God Of The Machine, which he proceeded to digest and ponder. Even so, by Branden's own statement, he "still didn't get it."
     There came a fateful day when Rand asked him: "Do you believe that man has the right to exist?"
     The young man replied, "Why, Miss Rand, of course he does!"
     Rand immediately countered, "You do understand, the right to exist means the right to exist for one's own sake?"
     Branden replied, "But Miss Rand, of course! If he didn't exist for his own sake, it would mean he was existing by permission!"
     Rand nodded and said, "The political implementation of that idea is capitalism."
     And Branden said, "Oh!"
     "From that beginning," Branden continued, "capitalism, for me, was filled with moral energy....It was the only economic system fit for human consumption."

     [As told by Branden to an audience at the 1987 California state Libertarian Party convention. From an essay first published at the Palace of Reason.]

Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.

The old monster snuffled, "Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.

"The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.

"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

[Robinson Jeffers]

     Have a nice day.