Capital 2.0: The Role of Property and Rights in Capitalism and Unmasked Anti-Capitalism

Lately I have been witnessing continuous attacks against the bad capitalism that is ruining the world. In all media, and especially in social media, this is a top thesis. This is an extremely strange phenomenon considering that practically everything that humanity has achieved – technical progress, duration and quality of life, clean environment (it is wonderfully described here ) – is due to capitalism or the free market. And this cannot be denied, and we all know what horrific consequences all the alternatives that have existed so far with an “-ism” at the end lead to, not to mention that economically they can never work.

In my opinion, the fundamental problem lies in the different understandings that are put into the concept of “capitalism”. For most people, capitalism is a system in which only those who own capital benefit. By “capital” they mean money and ownership of the means of production. And by “capitalist” they mean someone who lives off the rent from their capital and doesn’t lift a finger or a brain. This is the poisonous legacy of Karl Marx’s writings, which creates absolute delusion and leads to stories like the one in Greece. Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” literally pales in comparison to the damage that “Capital” has done to society and its understanding of capitalism.

By “capital” I, and every reasonable person, should understand everything that an individual owns and through which he can create value for himself and others. This includes the body, knowledge, skills, imagination, determination, will, as well as everything that we have produced but not consumed (i.e., saved) – the things that we can harness to create, earn, and live better. In this sense, private property is the basis for understanding and functioning of money, capital, and markets. [1] But in addition to private property, we also need two fundamental rights for every individual, namely:

1. to freely and unrestrictedly seek application of one's basic personal capital (skills, knowledge, entrepreneurship), that is, to produce and receive remuneration through it;
2. freely and unrestrictedly to choose how and for what to exchange the fruits of the application of one's capital (labor), that is, to buy, invest or donate.

This is a free market. This is different from feudalism and communism, where you have virtually neither of these rights. Being anti-capitalist means to some extent denying these two rights (as well as the right of people to own things). Being anti-capitalist means liking:

• people should not be able to freely use their cars, homes, laundries, tennis rackets as they see fit (Uber, Airbnb...);
• taxes that, in the name of supposedly noble causes, actually limit the choice of how to spend your money and create a solid cash flow from which anyone with enough power can collect as much as they want - income taxes, all kinds of excise taxes, different VAT rates, deposit fees, etc.;
• requiring young doctors to first work in Bulgaria for at least 5 years after graduation;
• the forced payment of health insurance to a monopolist, where your contribution increases with your income and after paying it you do not use the services of the health system, because this monopolist logically does not care about the quality of the service;
• paying pension insurance, where your contribution grows again along with your income, knowing that you will get almost nothing back from it when you need it;
• the idea of being obliged to pay for your children's education with the clear awareness that the education system is terribly inefficient and that children will not accumulate capital (knowledge, skills) in it through which they can live well;
• the prohibition of employers from selecting their employees according to criteria they consider adequate for the development of their business.

There could be thousands of examples.

If we return to the two basic rights (plus the right to private property) of the individual under capitalism, it follows that an anti-capitalist is someone who:

1. is afraid to live off the fruits of his own capital, because he clearly does not consider it competitive enough. Therefore, he prefers to have "solidarity" and redistribution of goods, to be sure that there will be some for him too. In addition, this creates a wonderful flow of goods, to which one only has to somehow attach oneself and it is settled. In fact, the dream of the anti-capitalist is to become his own understanding of "capitalist" (from the second paragraph) and to rentierize (Greece is next!).
2. considers himself very smart, and the rest - terribly stupid... According to him, people spend their money en masse on the "wrong" things and that is why the free market cannot work. For example, the defenders of the idea of a tax on "junk food" think like this: "I am smart and consume moderately - I do not stuff myself with cola and chips all day - but they, the ignorant, eat only this every day, get sick and empty their health insurance fund. That is why there must be a tax to influence their choice." Here, of course, the anti-capitalist misses the special moment that the solidarity health insurance fund in question exists in this form because of his own fear, described in the above point. In any case, it is precisely this logic of the higher mind that the anti-capitalist uses to argue for any mockery of personal choice. And again, the end result he hopes for is a wonderful stream of goods in which to bathe in his dreams.
3. considers himself moral, and the rest - creatures from hell, who, in addition to spending "wrongly", would never voluntarily support any cause. Defenders of state environmental protection, for example, reason like this: "I am spiritually elevated and love nature, I want to protect it, but these bastards would not give a penny for it. Therefore, taxes must be taken from everyone so that the state can do what I want." Of course, the main idea here is that the anti-capitalist will find himself again on the bank of the stream as a project contractor, for example... On the other hand, where the state plays the smallest role in people's lives, money for charity and membership in non-profit organizations is thousands of times more (or was thousands of times more before the state's intervention in this particular sphere) [2] than in our country.

Rereading the last few paragraphs, I think I've described the profile of the socialist intelligentsia of the recent past quite well: an inferiority complex combined with a delusion of grandeur and a sense of moral superiority. And it makes me sad. So, let's get this straight:

Our capital is everything that makes us free human beings: our knowledge, our skills, our will, and yes, our money and our property. That is why capitalism is the most humane system that can exist.

[1] In fact, in his brilliant essay “ Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” Ludwig von Mises categorically proves that socialism (and its derivatives) cannot work precisely because of the lack of private property and market prices.

[2] Виж: David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967; Greg Scandlen, Mutual Aid Societies: It’s Amazing What People Can Do Together; David Green, The Evolution of Mutual Aid.

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