In Defense Of Capitalism: Earned Value Creates Better, Happier Lives

There’s a reason non-capitalist nations are so poor and have populations that are miserable, and why capitalist nations are wealthy and comfortable. The reason capitalism is successful anywhere it’s tried is that the money that makes manufacturers and small businesses wealthy is earned by them. This also applies to the employees of corporations who also earn the money they make as employees and the money they earn as investors in a capitalist environment. A non-capitalist nation confiscates the little its people have in order to function based on the nation’s valueless local currency.

When a capitalist “earns” his or her wealth, it’s a result of the open and willing exchange of what the consumer has (money) in exchange for what the capitalist has (goods or services). Because of this free and willing exchange, capitalist nations create value whereas non-capitalist nations have nothing but worthless paper currency and poor, starving citizens.

This is not to say that Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, didn’t make a valid and necessary point about companies that cheat or mistreat their employees and customers, because his book stressed that point loud and clear. Bad companies may be sued for their misbehavior and may be regulated and put out of business if they don’t do the right thing by their customers. A government will most often not allow itself to be sued, so there’s no way of punishing government abuses, while corporations must conform or go out of business.

The government neither makes nor earns anything, it merely takes, via taxation. If it takes too much in the way of taxes it can hurt itself, because the earners it takes from can leave the country or intentionally earn less in order to decrease the tax burden the government imposes. For most of America’s history the government conformed to the United States constitution and did the necessary things listed in that document to preserve the national union, and as a result needed only enough money to fund the constitutional things assigned to it. Lately, however, government is increasing taxes to pay for things that are not necessary and not allowed by the constitution, and as a result it needs more and more money to pay for these unconstitutional things. Taxes are going up for all Americans who are earners, especially the wealthiest Americans.

To prove that our government knows that they, via unconstitutional practices and policies, have been killing the goose that laid the golden egg, they have for some time been planning how they can get their hands on our 401Ks and IRAs, because the stocks and bonds represented by these and other privately held funds are the only source of real value left in America. The value of these stocks and bonds was earned by the corporations they represent. Government bonds, on the other hand, are worthless in any real sense, and only hold value as long as the government remains solvent, which is dicey in the present world of increasing government debt that knows no bounds and is on a trajectory to the stars. This government confiscation plan is an admission by our rulers that the capitalist system, in creating value and worth, works and is necessary if we want to continue our pleasant lives, and it’s an admission that a government that doesn’t abide by the rules and insists on controlling its citizens’ lives and disobeying the constitution, is a failure.

It requires a democracy and a free populace to have a capitalist society.  The success of Apple, as a trendy example of the corporate world, proves the point: the government would never have thought to create the iPad or iPod, which people all over the world want and buy, and which products make Apple a wealthy company, which in turn makes their employees wealthy and also in turn makes their customers happy (and also wealthy if they, as an exercise of their freedom, invested in Apple stock). The success and increasing wealth of Apple also benefits the government because of the increasing wealth of the company and all of those customers and employees who benefit from its wealth. All governments can do for income is take money from citizens who work and invest, via taxation.  Government doesn’t generate wealth (except for politicians on the take like Harry Reid, et al) and government doesn’t make people happier by giving them the things they want (unless they are on welfare, and even then one cannot say that these takers are “happy” with their barely-making-it welfare checks, their boring, wasteful lives and their government-issued Obamaphones). The possessions in peoples’ lives have to be earned  by the individual in order to make them happy.  The more government takes from the earners, the less the entire population has in the way of wealth, and as government grows and taxes more heavily, it also deprives its citizens of liberty, which spikes unhappiness rather quickly.

As companies like Apple become burdened with increasing taxes they may stop expanding and their investors may begin to disappear. And as regulations on their products and their methods of manufacturing are imposed on them (as Obama’s EPA is currently doing to all industries in America), they stop innovating, expanding and hiring and everyone suffers, including the greedy government as fewer taxes are paid by investors and employees.