Progressive Claptrap

A fine Robert Higgs essay in defense of Capitalism:

There’s something charmingly quaint about the leftists’ continuing attack on capitalism, which is a type of economic order that, if it ever existed at all in this country, has not existed in recognizable form since the 1920s—in a more plausible assessment, not since the years before World War I. Yet the so-called progressives never tire of beating the long-dead horse of capitalism. Are they so ideologically blind that they cannot see how governments at every level have intervened and intervened again until they have displaced or distorted every element of the economic order that might once have contributed to its capitalist character? We live, as F. A. Hayek observed as long ago as 1935, not in a market system, but in a situation of interventionist chaos, where virtually every market is so hog-tied by regulations, laws, and taxes or so artificially pumped up by subsidies, regulatory advantages, and tax loopholes that virtually nothing remains pure and unsullied by the filthy hand of the interventionist state. We inhabit, as we have for nearly a century, a blessed “mixed economy.” What’s this ongoing nonsense about the failure of capitalism? Before anything can fail, it must first exist.

Then comes the obligatory progressive whack at greed, as if those who conduct business among consenting buyers and sellers are intrinsically soiled by an unworthy motivation, whereas, in stark contrast, those whose greed is expressed through state-sanctioned robbery and extortion are, lo and behold, verging on sainthood. How did these people come to believe that getting something done by threatening violence against those who don’t care to join the party—that is, by working through the state—stands higher on the holiness scale than private voluntary cooperation? It takes a special kind of intelligence to achieve this sort of twisted moral outlook, but the New York Times, along with the other upscale news media, has succeeded in finding writers whose ability is equal to the challenge.

Notice also the assumption that markets are driven by “irrational exuberance,” rather than by rational calculation and bottom-line self-responsibility, and that any perceived market failure must have been the result of “the weakness of regulatory systems.” Can anything fly more flagrantly in the face of centuries of facts? When have governments ever acted more rationally than private individuals in free markets? And when have stronger regulations ever solved any real problem, as opposed to creating new or greater problems where private actors were chipping away at genuine solutions, had they only been left alone to carry out their plans? The shelves are groaning under the weight of the Code of Federal Regulations, yet the progressive will never rest until we have reached that nirvana in which everything that is not forbidden is required.

Read the whole thing here.