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his article is dedicated to:
A man I met, with most of his body heavily burned, simply because he
was a Chinese during the 1998 May Riot in Indonesia.
Lots of capitalists that are slaughtered during the cultural evolution.
Ten thousands of peaceful smugglers that are massacred in Banda island
by the Dutch for conducting peaceful spice trade and all that are
similar to them.
All minority groups and individuals that face discrimination, even
genocide, for economically contributing too much for their society.
All customers that have to pay higher products due to protection of
tariff and trades.
Productive people that are fined with income tax for the victimless
crime of making honest money.
Smart students that are slowed down so not to move too fast.
Industries that do not get subsidy, or even banned to protect
unproductive industry and laborers that earn much less due to such
restrictions.
Poor starving people that could have been rich had their countries
choose to embrace free market.
Women and males that are trapped in unhappy marriage which they have a
hard time getting out.
Women and children that have lots of their best choices taken under the
pretext of protection.
Immigrants and refuges.
Is welfare part of capitalism?
In short, no. In consensually, punishing the productive through income
tax to reward parasitic behavior is the biggest affront against the
principle of free market. In fact, from many governments intervention
in economy, the one that proponents of free market often oppose the
most is welfare.
However, when we look further, capitalism and welfare is not really
total opposites. Most importantly, properly done, a straight forward
welfare program can cause less market distortion, and hence an
efficient replacement to buy votes from losers, than farm subsidies,
public schools, minimum wage, trades restrictions, tariffs, and sex
laws. If it's done by taxing wealth, rather than income, the amount of
market distortion can be minimized further.
Welfare is also cheap. It'll cost $5000/year to a welfare recipient
in USA, for example. However, we need to remember that the
recipients' lifestyle worth only $500. The other $4500 goes to
implicit welfare due to higher living costs. That implicit welfare
includes minimum wage, immigrations laws, and food subsidy, or
protections.
If somehow a straight forward explicit welfare program can replace all
relatively more evil governments' interventions, then capitalists are
probably better of not opposing welfare so much. Even Milton Friedman
supports schemes called guaranteed minimum income, which is like
welfare but with much less market distortion.
That's not where the similarity ends. One of the main creeds of
capitalism is that consent and competition should be preferred over
force. Without that consent, anyone can simply make us choose to make
our self worst of under the pretext that it is for our own good. In
fact, most laws against consensual acts can be traced down to
protection of some disgruntled competitors often done under the pretext
of the consenting parties' own good.
Anti prostitution and anti polygamy laws, for example, is there to
ration females to poor dumb males under the pretext of protecting the
consenting women. Of course, all natural resources tend to be rationed
somewhat proportional to ones' voting power. And that does explain
why democracy and anti polygamy laws go hand in hand too. One man one
vote soon leads to one man one wife.
Well, at least Matt Ridley agrees with me and he's a well known
mainstream scientific researchers. I guess that's also why so many
uncompetitive people want to ensure that evolution theory is not taught
in school. You can also read a famous psikiatrist book, "The road less
traveled," you'll see that life long monogamous marriage is just a trap
to prevent highly desirable people from being available to those who
they want more, and romance is just the lure to that trap.
On the women side, anti pornography laws is really meant to prevent
highly desirable women from advertising her assets and hence protecting
less pretty women from the higher industry standard a public display of
superior desirability might cause. Countries that embrace porn tend to
have prettier women. Where did all the unsexy ones go? They're all
shifting out of the gene pool, and hence are doing their best to oppose
porn preaching religious doctrines that men should judge women based on
any features but beauty, which they can't offer.
Another issue is consent. Welfare program is not consensual; however,
it's relatively more consensual then civil war. In ancient time, when
we have different ideological opinions, we end up killing each other to
proof who are "right." The Catholic would kill the Gnostic, the
Sunni would kill the Shiah. One King would kill the other. A younger
prince will argue that the older prince is demon. Might makes right.
Such differences of opinions are of course solved with war, which is a
very cost inefficient way to know who're "right." However it does
work in some subjective practical sense. If we look in the past and try
to figure out whether the Gnostic or the Catholic is the one that's
heretical or "right" respectively, we need only to see who won. The
Gnostics are slaughtered, so they must be the heretic, or do they? At
least I bet there are way more people in the world that think that way
than the other way around, excluding me actually.
It doesn't matter how many books many institutionalized religions
burned, how much restrictions of freedom of speech and irrationality
they embraced, how many witnesses they snuffed outs and all other
techniques that would not have stand the scrutiny of a peer reviewed
scientific journal, or even a reasonable jury in the court of law. Too
many people don't believe who are right and reasonable, they believe
who are mighty. Right or wrong, the win will always become right
anyway.
Now, under democratic context, we don't kill those who oppose us,
rather we try to persuade enough people to join our cause. How do we
persuade them? By money of course. Welfare program is then a reasonably
cost efficient method to buy votes.
When too many people are on a side, we will sort of know that going to
war will hurt the other side; hence we comply anyway with the whim of
majority avoiding the costly alternatives. While not ideal, this is
indeed how right and wrong is really decided, proper assessments of
each sides' bargaining position and mutually cherished compromised line
of war, plus a bunch of lies covering what's going on to safe each
sides' face.
No matter how noble the purpose, lies and prejudices lead to
misunderstanding, that leads to more war. Hence, the best contribution
is simply to unmask all lies.
All in all, peaceful democracy is indeed a more cost efficient ways to
measure ones' bargaining position. While democracy often lead to
decisions opposites of freedom, like popularly supported victimless
crime, income tax, and welfare, it's indeed relatively more cost
efficient than civil war.
That's not when the coherency end. Various natural laws restrict
various possible political outcomes. We can't expect a stone will fly
to the sky when we drop it as much as we cannot expect a human to be
generally unselfish. If we want to kill our enemies, we'll do well
dropping a big stone on top
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