Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government by Yaron Brook & Don Watkins

Author:Yaron Brook & Don Watkins [Brook, Yaron]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012-09-17T14:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: MARKETS ARE MORAL

In a 2011 interview with publisher Steve Forbes, the chairman and CEO of Honeywell, David Cote, attacked the popular image of businessmen as villains. “We’re the good guys,” Cote said again and again. “In total, if we take a look at the standard of living we have today, our position in the world, our military strength . . . it’s all driven by U.S. business.” Cote even went on to dismiss the notion that businessmen have to “give something back.” “I never took anything,” he exclaimed.31

Few businessmen are so willing to defend their vocation. The businessman, H. L. Mencken once observed, “is the only man . . . who is forever apologizing for his occupation.”32 But then Forbes asked Cote, “When your kids ask you, how do you say markets are moral? How do you make that case?”

For a moment, Cote was at a loss. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t know that markets are always moral. I think that markets are markets.” He stammered awkwardly for a while before concluding, “I can’t say that’s moral or immoral, it’s just kind of the way it works.”33

If we want to stop the growth of the state, this is the view that has to change. Americans need to understand what the free market is, how it works—and why it is profoundly good. Not just okay. Not just the worst economic system except for all the rest. We need to grasp that the free market is an ideal—a profoundly, perfectly, flawlessly moral economic system—and that anyone who opposes it to whatever extent is wrong.

Capitalism is the system of selfishness—of rational selfishness. It doesn’t guarantee that each individual will be rational, be productive, and abide by the rule of trade. What it does do is leave men free to be rationally selfish, reward them for being rationally selfish, and prevent those who default on that goal from imposing the consequences of their irrationality on others. This, Ayn Rand argued, is what it means for capitalism to be a moral system.

Capitalism is more than an economic system; it is a social system that protects freedom: intellectual, political, and economic. This book’s focus, however, is on this last. We’re now ready to turn our attention to the economics of capitalism.

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