Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This is the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constitutes a major philosophic revolution.
Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan.
Observe one of the ugliest characteristics of today's world: the mixture of frantic war preparations with hysterical peace propaganda, and the fact that both come from the same source—from the same political philosophy.
The bankrupt, yet still dominant, political philosophy of our age is stat-isnu Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism.
This means that they are opposed to the use of The ObjectMsi, June Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate—in the name of love for humanity. It is obvious that the ideological root of statism or collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice mem whenever it pleases to whatever it deems to be its own "good.
The history of all primitive peoples is a succession of tribal wars and intertribal slaughter. That this savage ideology now rules nations armed with nuclear weapons, should give pause to anyone concerned with mankind's survival. Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power—to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed.
When brute force is the only criterion of social conduct, and unresisting surrender to destruction is the only alternative, even the lowest of men, even an animal—even a cornered rat—will fight There can be no peace within an enslaved nation.
The bloodiest conflicts of history were not wars between nations, but civil wars between men of the same nation, who could find no peaceful recourse to law, principle, or justice. Observe that the history of all absolute states is punctuated by bloody uprisings—by violent eruptions of blind despair, without ideology, program, or goals—which were usually put down by ruthless extermination.
In a mixed economy, it takes the form of pressure-group warfare, each group fighting for legislation to extort its own advantages by force from all other groups. The degree of statism in a country's political system, is the degree to which it breaks up the country into rival gangs and sets men against one another.
When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone's claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one's wishes are limited only by the power of one's gang. In order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate, and destroy one another; it is a system of underground plotting, of secret conspiracies, of deals, favors, betrayals, and sudden, bloody coups.
It is not a system conducive to brotherhood, security, cooperation, and peace. Statism—in fact and in principle—is nothing more than gang rule. A dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his own country's economy, he attacks his neighbors. It is bis only means of postponing internal collapse and prolonging his rule. A country that violates the rights of its own citizens, will not respect the rights of its neighbors.
Those who do not recognize individual rights, will not recognize the rights of nations: a nation is only a number of individuals. Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production. Observe that the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones.
Observe that in World War n, bothGermany andRussia seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home—while the freest of the mixed economies, the semi-capitalisticUnited States , sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies. In fact, theUnited States lost, economically, even though it won the war: it was left with an enormous national debt, augmented by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former allies and enemies to this day.
Yet it is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate—in the name of peace. Putnam's Sons, Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose.
Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens—there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact—and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction by winning the war.
Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace. In a statist economy, where wealth is "publicly owned," a citizen has no economic interests to protect by preserving peace—he is only a drop in the common bucket—while war gives him the fallacious hope of larger handouts from his masters.
Ideologically, he is trained to regard men as sacrificial animals; he is one himself; he can have no concept of why foreigners should not be sacrificed on the same public altar for the benefit of the same state. The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history.
Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders—for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as "selfish" and conquest as "noble. It must be remembered that the political systems of the nineteenth century were not pure capitalism, but mixed economies.
The element of freedom, however, was dominant; it was as close to a century of capitalism as mankind has come. But the element of statism kept growing throughout the nineteenth century, and by the time it blasted the world in , the governments involved were dominated by statist policies.
Just as, in domestic affairs, all the evils caused by statism and government controls were blamed on capitalism and the free market—so, in foreign affairs, all the evils of statist policies were blamed on and ascribed to capitalism.
Such myths as "capitalistic imperialism," "war-profiteering," or the notion that capitalism has to win "markets" by military conquest are examples of the superficiality or the unscrupulous-ness of statist commentators and historians.
The essence of capitalism's foreign policy is free trade— i. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies. As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire because it opened world channels of energy for commerce in general. Though repressive status government was still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with very bad results, on the whole England's invisible exports were law and free trade.
Practically speaking, while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety. Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value temporarily only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force. The same type of businessmen who sought special advantages by government action in their own countries, sought special markets by government action abroad.
At whose expense? At the expense of the overwhelming majority of businessmen who paid the taxes for such ventures, but gained nothing. Who justified such policies and sold them to the public? Originally published by G. Putnam's Sons, New York, Remember that private citizens—whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers—have no power to start a war.
That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government. Which type of government is more likely to plunge a country into war: a government of limited powers, bound by constitutional restrictions—or an unlimited government, open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests or ideologies, a government able to command armies to march at the whim of a single chief executive?
Yet it is not a limited government that today's peace-lovers are advocating. Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked.
But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service—which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man's right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor.
But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.
So long as a country is even semi-free, its mixed-economy profiteers are not the source of its warlike influences or policies, and are not the primary cause of its involvement in war.
They are merely political scavengers cashing-in on a public trend. The primary cause of that trend is the mixed-economy intellectuals. Observe the link between statism and militarism in the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just as the destruction of capitalism and the rise of the totalitarian state were not caused by business or labor or any economic interests, but by the dominant statist ideology of the intellectuals—so the resurgence of the doctrines of military conquest and armed crusades for political "ideals" were the product of the same intellectuals' belief that "the good" is to be achieved by force.
The rise of a spirit of nationalistic imperialism in the United States did not come from the right, but from the left, not from big-business interests, but from the collectivist reformers who influenced the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Ekiroh, Js In such instances [writes Professor Ekirch] as title progressives' increasing acceptance of compulsory military training and of the white man's burden, there were obvious reminders of the paternalism of much of their economic reform legislation. Imperialism, according to a recent student of American foreign policy, was a revolt against many of the values of traditional liberalism.
Its editor, Herbert Croly, used such arguments as: "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure. The quotation on "the spirit of imperialism" comes from R. World War II led, not to "Four Freedoms," but to the surrender of one-third of the world's population into communist slavery.
If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude—and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale—would make them pause and check their statist premises.
Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that "poverty breeds wars" and justifying war by sympathizing with a "material greed" of that kind. But the question is: what breeds poverty? If you look at the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity. Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into the "haves" and the "have-nots.
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some any alleged "good" can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations. It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate.
But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him. And there is something obscene in the attitude of those who regard horror as a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream against the danger to the tribe itself—and more: who are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless victims, but march in protest against wars between the well-armed.
So long as men are subjugated by force, they will fight back and use any weapons available. If a man is led to a Nazi gas chamber or a Soviet firing squad, with no voices raised to defend him, would he feel any love or concern for the survival of mankind? Or would he be more justified in feeling that a cannibalistic mankind, which tolerates dictatorships, does not deserve to survive? If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer.
Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force—outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace—those who do love man and do care about his survival—realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.
If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased— would you call that persecution?
If your answer is "yes"—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen. The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the "liberal" intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities.
It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen. Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts.
Today's "liberals" consider a businessman guilty in any con- flict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line "right or wrong.
Today's "liberals" recognize the workers' the majority's right to their livelihood their wages , but deny the businessmen's the minority's right to their livelihood their profits.
If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains"; if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known.
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.
In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. America has not yet reached the stage of a dictatorship. But, paving the way to it, for many decades past, the busi- nessmen have served as the scapegoat for statist movements of all kinds: communist, fascist, or welfare.
For whose sins and evils did the businessmen take the blame? For the sins and evils of the bureaucrats. A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: "A hungry man is not free," or "It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. The difference between political power and any other kind of social "power," between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. This distinction is so important and so seldom recognized today that I must urge you to keep it in mind.
Let me repeat it: a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. No individual or private group or private organization has the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice.
Only a government holds that power. The nature of governmental action is: coercive action. The nature of political power is: the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury—the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death. Foggy metaphors, sloppy images, unfocused poetry, and equivocations—such as "A hungry man is not free"—do not alter the fact that only political power is the power of physical coercion and that freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.
The only proper function of the government of a free country is to act as an agency which protects the individual's rights, i. Such a government does not have the right to initiate the use of physical force against anyone—a right which the individual does not possess and, therefore, cannot delegate to any agency.
But the individual does possess the right of self-defense and that is the right which he delegates to the government, for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement A proper government has the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect men from criminals; the military forces, to protect men from foreign invaders; and the law courts, to protect men's property and contracts from breach by force or fraud, and to settle disputes among men according to objectively defined laws.
These, implicitly, were the political principles on which the Constitution of the United States was based; implicitly, but not explicitly.
There were contradictions in the Constitution, which allowed the statists to gain an entering wedge, to enlarge the breach, and, gradually, to wreck the structure. A statist is a man who believes that some men have the right to force, coerce, enslave, rob, and murder others. To be put into practice, this belief has to be implemented by the political doctrine that the government—the state—has the right to initiate the use of physical force against its citizens.
How often force is to be used, against whom, to what extent, for what purpose and for whose benefit, are irrelevant questions. The rest is only a matter of time.
Now let us consider the question of economic power. What is economic power? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade.
In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined— not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone's "greed" or by anyone's need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants.
Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer. Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, "democratic" vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country.
Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself "the voice of the public" and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.
Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear. America's industrial progress, in the short span of a century and a half, has acquired the character of a legend: it has never been equaled anywhere on earth, in any period of history.
What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats. A system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. What did exist were only so-called mixed economies, which means: a mixture, in varying degrees, of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government coercion, of capitalism and statism. America was the freest country on earth, but elements of statism were present in her economy from the start.
These elements kept growing, under the influence of her intellectuals who were predominantly committed to the philosophy of statism. The intellectuals—the ideologists, the interpreters, the assessors of public events—were tempted by the opportunity to seize political power, relinquished by all other social groups, and to establish their own versions of a "good" society at the point of a gun, i.
They denounced the free businessmen as exponents of "selfish greed" and glorified the bureaucrats as "public servants. Morgan—were self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market. But there existed another kind of businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government, such men as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad.
It was the political power behind their activities—the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges—that caused dislocations in the country's economy, hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free market and the free businessmen that took the blame. Every calamitous consequence of government controls was used as a justification for the extension of the controls and of the government's power over the economy.
If I were asked to choose the date which marks the turning point on the road to the ultimate destruction of American industry, and the most infamous piece of legislation in American history, I would choose the year and the Sherman Act—which began that grotesque, irrational, malignant growth of unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudica-ble contradictions known as the antitrust laws.
Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others.
For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or, rather, for a successful "intent to monopolize"; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for "unfair competition" or "restraint of trade"; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for "collusion" or "conspiracy.
Neale points out that the prohibition of "restraint of trade" is the essence of antitrust—and that no exact definition of what constitutes "restraint of trade" can be given. Thus no one can tell what the law forbids or permits one to do; the interpretation of these laws is left entirely up to the courts. A businessman or his lawyer has to study the whole body of the so-called case law—the whole record of court cases, precedents, and decisions—in order to get even a generalized idea of the current meaning of these laws; except that the precedents may be upset and the decisions reversed tomorrow or next week or next year.
No broad definition can really unlock the meaning of the statute. Retroactive or ex post facto law—i. It is a form of persecution practiced only in dictatorships and forbidden by every civilized code of law.
It is specifically forbidden by the United States Constitution. It is not supposed to exist in the United States and it is not applied to anyone—except to businessmen. A case in which a man cannot know until he is convicted whether the action he took in the past was legal or illegal, is certainly a case of retroactive law. One of the hazards [writes Mr. Fleming] that sales managers must now take into account is that some policy followed today in the light of the best legal opinion may next year be reinterpreted as illegal.
In 'Ibid. Another kind of hazard consists in the possibility of treble damage suits, also possibly retroactive. Firms which, with the best of intentions, run afoul of the law on one of the above counts, are open to treble damage suits under the antitrust laws, even though their offense was a course of conduct that everyone considered, at the time, quite legal as well as ethical, but that a subsequent reinterpretation of the law found to be illegal.
Fairless, then President of United States Steel Corporation, said: Gentlemen, I don't have to tell you that if we persist in that kind of a system of law—and if we enforce it impartially against all offenders—virtually every business in America, big and small, is going to have to be run from Atlanta, Sing Sing, Leavenworth, or Alcatraz. The legal treatment accorded to actual criminals is much superior to that accorded to businessmen. The criminal's rights are protected by objective laws, objective procedures, objective rules of evidence.
A criminal is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. Only businessmen—the producers, the providers, the supporters, the Atlases who carry our whole economy on their shoulders—are regarded as guilty by nature and are required to prove their innocence, without any definable criteria of innocence or proof, and are left at the mercy of the whim, the favor, or the malice of any publicity-seeking politician, any scheming statist, any envious mediocrity who might chance to work his way into a bureaucratic job and who feels a yen to do some trust-busting.
The better or more honorable kind of government officials have repeatedly protested against the non-objective nature of the antitrust laws. In the same speech, Mr. There is such a welter of laws governing interstate commerce that the Government literally can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute.
I say that this system is an outrage. Further, Mr, Fairless quotes a comment written by Supreme Court Justice Jackson when he was the head of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice: It is impossible for a lawyer to determine what business conduct will be pronounced lawful by the Courts. This situation is embarrassing to businessmen wishing to obey the law and to Government officials attempting to enforce it.
That embarrassment, however, is not shared by all members of the government. Fleming's book quotes the following statement made by Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, at a symposium of the New York State Bar Association, in January I want to make it clear that I would vigorously oppose any antitrust laws that attempted to particularize violations, giving bills of particulars to replace general principles.
The law must remain fluid, allowing for a dynamic society. The tragic irony of that whole issue is the fact that the antitrust laws were created and, to this day, are supported by the so-called "conservatives," by the alleged defenders of free enterprise. This is a grim proof of the fact that capitalism has never had any proper, philosophical defenders—and a measure of the extent to which its alleged champions lacked any political principles, any knowledge of economics, and any understanding of the nature of political power.
The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. It means: protecting people's freedom by the arbitrary rule of unanswerable bureaucratic edicts.
What were the historical causes that led to the passage of the Sherman Act? I quote from the book by Mr. Neale: The impetus behind the movement for the earliest legislation gathered strength during the 's and the 's. After the Civil War the railways with their privileges, charters, and subsidies became the main objects of suspicion and hostility. It was the politically granted privileges—the charters and subsidies of the railroads—that people rebelled against; it was these privileges that had placed the railroads of the West outside the reach of competition and had given them a monopolistic power, with all its consequent abuses.
But the remedy, written into law by a Republican Congress, consisted of destroying the businessmen's freedom and of extending the power of political controls over the economy. If you wish to observe the real American tragedy, compare the ideological motivation of the antitrust laws to their actual results. I quote from Mr. Neale's book: It seems likely that American distrust of all sources of unchecked power is a more deep-rooted and persistent motive behind the antitrust policy than any economic belief or any radical political trend.
This distrust may be seen in many spheres of American life It is expressed in the theories of "checks and balances" and of "separation of powers. It is always hoped that any particular holder of power, whether political or economic, will be subject to the threat of encroachment by other authorities The famous prescription of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights—"to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men"—is a favourite American quotation and an essential one for understanding antitrust.
The first free society in history destroyed its freedom—in the name of protecting freedom. The failure to differentiate between political and economic power allowed men to suppose that coercion could be a proper "balance" to production, that both were activities of the same order which could serve as a "check" on each other, that the "authority" of a businessman and the "authority" of a bureaucrat were interchangeable rivals for the same social function.
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