Animals are driven by instinctive urges. They yield to the impulse which prevails at the moment and peremptorily asks for satisfaction. They are the puppets of their appetites.

Man’s eminence is to be seen in the fact that he chooses between alternatives. He regulates his behavior deliberatively. He can master his impulses and desires; he has the power to suppress wishes the satisfaction of which would force him to renounce the attainment of more important goals. In short: man acts; he purposively aims at ends chosen. This is what we have in mind in stating that man is a moral person, responsible for his conduct.

Freedom as a Postulate of Morality

All the teachings and precepts of ethics, whether based upon a religious creed or whether based upon a secular doctrine like that of the Stoic philosophers, presuppose this moral autonomy of the individual and therefore appeal to the individual’s conscience. They presuppose that the individual is free to choose among various modes of conduct and require him to behave in compliance with definite rules, the rules of morality. Do the right things, shun the bad things.

It is obvious that the exhortations and admonishments of morality make sense only when addressing individuals who are free agents. They are vain when directed to slaves. It is useless to tell a bondsman what is morally good and what is morally bad. He is not free to determine his comportment; he is forced to obey the orders of his master. It is difficult to blame him if he prefers yielding to the commands of his master to the most cruel punishment threatening not only him but also the members of his family.

This is why freedom is not only a political postulate, but no less a postulate of every religious or secular morality.

The Struggle for Freedom

Yet for thousands of years a considerable part of mankind was either entirely or at least in many regards deprived of the faculty to choose between what is right and what is wrong. In the status society of days gone by the freedom to act according to their own choice was, for the lower strata of society, the great majority of the population, seriously restricted by a rigid system of controls. An outspoken formulation of this principle was the statute of the Holy Roman Empire that conferred upon the princes and counts of the Reich (Empire) the power and the right to determine the religious allegiance of their subjects.

The Orientals meekly acquiesced in this state of affairs. But the Christian peoples of Europe and their scions that settled in overseas territories never tired in their struggle for liberty. Step by step they abolished all status and caste privileges and disabilities until they finally succeeded in establishing the system that the harbingers of totalitarianism try to smear by calling it the bourgeois system.

The Supremacy of the Consumers

The economic foundation of this bourgeois system is the market economy in which the consumer is sovereign. The consumer, i.e., everybody, determines by his buying or abstention from buying what should be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. The businessmen are forced by the instrumentality of profit and loss to obey the orders of the consumers, Only those enterprises can flourish that supply in the best possible and cheapest way those commodities and services which the buyers are most anxious to acquire. Those who fail to satisfy the public suffer losses and are finally forced to go out of business.

In the precapitalistic ages the rich were the owners of large landed estates. They or their ancestors had acquired their property as gifts?feuds or fiefs?from the sovereign who?with their aid?had conquered the country and subjugated its inhabitants. These aristocratic landowners were real lords as they did not depend on the patronage of buyers. But the rich of a capitalistic industrial society are subject to the supremacy of the market. They acquire their wealth by serving the consumers better than other people do and they forfeit their wealth when other people satisfy the wishes of the consumers better or cheaper than they do. In the free market economy the owners of capital are forced to invest it in those lines in which it best serves the public. Thus ownership of capital goods is continually shifted into the hands of those who have best succeeded in serving the consumers. In the market economy private property is in this sense a public service imposing upon the owners the responsibility of employing it in the best interests of the sovereign consumers. This is what economists mean when they call the market economy a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.

The Political Aspects of Freedom

Representative government is the political corollary of the market economy. The same spiritual movement that created modern capitalism substituted elected officeholders for the authoritarian rule of absolute kings and hereditary aristocracies. It was this much-decried bourgeois liberalism that brought freedom of conscience, of thought, of speech, and of the press and put an end to the intolerant persecution of dissenters.

A free country is one in which every citizen is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is free to compete on the market for the most desirable jobs and on the political scene for the highest offices. He does not depend more on other people’s favor than these others depend on his favor. If he wants to succeed on the market, he has to satisfy the consumers; if he wants to succeed in public affairs he has to satisfy the voters. This system has brought to the capitalistic countries of Western Europe, America, and Australia an unprecedented increase in population figures and the highest standard of living ever known in history. The much talked-about common man has at his disposal amenities of which the richest men in precapitalistic ages did not even dream. He is in a position to enjoy the spiritual and intellectual achievements of science, poetry, and art that in earlier days were accessible only to a small elite of well-to-do people. And he is free to worship as his conscience tells him.

The Socialist Misrepresentation of the Market Economy

All the facts about the operation of the capitalistic system are misrepresented and distorted by the politicians and writers who arrogated to themselves the label of liberalism, the school of thought that in the 19th century crushed the arbitrary rule of monarchs and aristocrats and paved the way for free trade and enterprise. As these advocates of a return to despotism see it, all the evils that plague mankind are due to sinister machinations on the part of big business. What is needed to bring about wealth and happiness for all decent people is to put the corporations under strict government control. They admit, although only obliquely, that this means the adoption of socialism, the system of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But they protest that socialism will be something entirely different in the countries of Western civilization from what it is in Russia. And anyway, they say, there is no other method to deprive the mammoth corporations of the enormous power they have acquired and to prevent them from further damaging the interests of the people.

Against all this fanatical propaganda there is need to emphasize again and again the truth that it is big business that brought about the unprecedented improvement of the masses’ standard of living. Luxury goods for a comparatively small number of well-to-do can be produced by small-size enterprises. But the fundamental principle of capitalism is to produce for the satisfaction of the wants of the many. The same people who are employed by the big corporations are the main consumers of the goods turned out. If you look around in the household of an average American wage-earner, you will see for whom the wheels of the machines are turning. It is big business that makes all the achievements of modern technology accessible to the common man. Everybody is benefited by the high productivity of big scale production.

It is silly to speak of the “power” of big business. The very mark of capitalism is that supreme power in all economic matters is vested in the consumers. All big enterprises grew from modest beginnings into bigness because the patronage of the consumers made them grow. It would be impossible for small or medium-size firms to turn out those products which no present-day American would like to do without. The bigger a corporation is, the more does it depend on the consumers’ readiness to buy its wares. It was the wishes?or, as some say, the folly?of the consumers that drove the automobile industry into the production of ever bigger cars and force it today to manufacture smaller cars. Chain stores and department stores are under the necessity to adjust their operations daily anew to the satisfaction of the changing wants of their customers. The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.

A man who criticizes the conduct of business affairs and pretends to know better methods for the provision of the consumers is just an idle babbler. If he thinks that his own designs are better, why does he not try them himself? There are in this country always capitalists in search of a profitable investment of their funds who are ready to provide the capital required for any reasonable innovations. The public is always eager to buy what is better or cheaper or better and cheaper. What counts in the market is not fantastic reveries, but doing. It was not talking that made the “tycoons” rich, but service to the customers.

Capital Accumulation Benefits All of the People

It is fashionable nowadays to pass over in silence the fact that all economic betterment depends on saving and the accumulation of capital. None of the marvelous achievements of science and technology could have been practically utilized if the capital required had not previously been made available. What prevents the economically backward nations from taking full advantage of all the Western methods of production and thereby keeps their masses poor, is not unfamiliarity with the teachings of technology but the insufficiency of their capital. One badly misjudges the problems facing the underdeveloped countries if one asserts that what they lack is technical knowledge, the “know how.” Their businessmen and their engineers, most of them graduates of the best schools of Europe and America, are well acquainted with the state of contemporary applied science. What ties their hands is a shortage of capital.

A hundred years ago America was even poorer than these backward nations. What made the United States become the most affluent country of the world was the fact that the “rugged individualism” of the years before the New Deal did not place too serious obstacles in the way of enterprising men. Businessmen became rich because they consumed only a small part of their profits and plowed the much greater part back into their businesses. Thus they enriched themselves and all of the people. For it was this accumulation of capital that raised the marginal productivity of labor and thereby wage rates.

Under capitalism the acquisitiveness of the individual businessman benefits not only himself but also all other people. There is a reciprocal relation between his acquiring wealth by serving the consumers and accumulating capital and the improvement of the standard of living of the wage-earners who form the majority of the consumers. The masses are in their capacity both as wage-earners and as consumers interested in the flowering of business. This is what the old liberals had in mind when they declared that in the market economy there prevails a harmony of the true interests of all groups of the population.

Economic Well-Being Threatened by Statism

It is in the moral and mental atmosphere of this capitalistic system that the American citizen lives and works. There are still in some parts of the United States conditions left which appear highly unsatisfactory to the prosperous inhabitants of the advanced districts which form the greater part of the country. But the rapid progress of industrialization would have long since wiped out these pockets of backwardness if the unfortunate policies of the New Deal had not slowed down the accumulation of capital, the irreplaceable tool of economic betterment. Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the “American way of life” and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible. He is not earnestly disturbed by the operation of factors that are bound not only to stop further accumulation of capital but may very soon bring about capital decumulation. He does not oppose the forces that?by frivolously increasing public expenditure, by cutting down capital accumulation, and even making for consumption of parts of the capital invested in business, and, finally, by inflation?are sapping the very foundations of his material well-being. He is not concerned about the growth of statism that wherever it has been tried resulted in producing and preserving conditions which in his eyes are shockingly wretched.

No Personal Freedom Without Economic Freedom

Unfortunately many of our contemporaries fail to realize what a radical change in the moral conditions of man, the rise of statism, the substitution of government omnipotence for this market economy, is bound to bring about. They are deluded by the idea that there prevails a clear-cut dualism in the affairs of man, that there is on the one side a sphere of economic activities and on the other side a field of activities that are considered as noneconomic. Between these two fields there is, they think, no close connection. The freedom that socialism abolishes is “only” the economic freedom, while freedom in all other matters remains unimpaired.

However, these two spheres are not independent of each other as this doctrine assumes. Human beings do not float in ethereal regions. Everything that a man does must necessarily in some way or other affect the economic or material sphere and requires his power to interfere with this sphere. In order to subsist, he must toil and have the opportunity to deal with some material tangible goods.

The confusion manifests itself in the popular idea that what is going on in the market refers merely to the economic side of human life and action. But in fact the prices of the market reflect not only “material concerns”?like getting food, shelter, and other amenities?but no less those concerns which are commonly called spiritual or higher or nobler. The observance or nonobservance of religious commandments?to abstain from certain activities altogether or on specific days, to assist those in need, to build and to maintain houses of worship, and many others?is one of the factors that determines the supply of, and the demand for, various consumers’ goods and thereby prices and the conduct of business. The freedom that the market economy grants to the individual is not merely “economic” as distinguished from some other kind of freedom. It implies the freedom to determine also all those issues which are considered as moral, spiritual, and intellectual.

In exclusively controlling all the factors of production the socialist regime controls also every individual’s whole life. The government assigns to everybody a definite job. It determines what books and papers ought to be printed and read, who should enjoy the opportunity to embark on writing, who should be entitled to use public assembly halls, to broadcast and to use all other communication facilities. This means that those in charge of the supreme conduct of government affairs ultimately determine which ideas, teachings, and doctrines can be propagated and which not. Whatever a written and promulgated constitution may say about the freedom of conscience, thought, speech, and the press and about neutrality in religious matters must in a socialist country remain a dead letter if the government does not provide the material means for the exercise of these rights. He who monopolizes all media of communication has full power to keep a tight hand on the individuals’ minds and souls.

What makes many people blind to the essential features of any socialist or totalitarian system is the illusion that this system will be operated precisely in the way which they themselves consider as desirable. In supporting socialism, they take it for granted that the “state” will always do what they themselves want it to do. They call only that brand of totalitarianism “true,” “real,” or “good” socialism the rulers of which comply with their own ideas. All other brands they decry as counterfeit. What they first of all expect from the dictator is that he will suppress all those ideas of which they themselves disapprove. In fact, all these supporters of socialism are, unbeknown to themselves, obsessed by the dictatorial or authoritarian complex. They want all opinions and plans with which they disagree to be crushed by violent action on the part of the government.

The Meaning of the Effective Right to Dissent

The various groups that are advocating socialism, no matter whether they call themselves communists, socialists, or merely social reformers, agree in their essential economic program. They all want to substitute state control?or, as some of them prefer to call it, social control?of production activities for the market economy with its supremacy of the individual consumers. What separates them from one another is not issues of economic management, but religious and ideological convictions. There are Christian socialists?Catholic and Protestant of different denominations?and there are atheist socialists. Each of these varieties of socialism takes it for granted that the socialist commonwealth will be guided by the precepts of their own faith or of their rejection of any religious creed. They never give a thought to the possibility that the socialist regime may be directed by men hostile to their own faith and moral principles who may consider it as their duty to use all the tremendous power of the socialist apparatus for the suppression of what in their eyes is error, superstition, and idolatry.

The simple truth is that individuals can be free to choose between what they consider as right or wrong only where they are economically independent of the government. A socialist government has the power to make dissent impossible by discriminating against unwelcome religious and ideological groups and denying them all the material implements that are required for the propagation and the practice of their convictions. The one-party system, the political principle of socialist rule, implies also the one-religion and one-morality system. A socialist government has at its disposal means that can be used for the attainment of rigorous conformity in every regard, Gleichschaltung (political conformity) as the Nazis called it. Historians have pointed out what an important role in the Reformation was played by the printing press. But what chances would the reformers have had, if all the printing presses had been operated by the governments headed by Charles V of Germany and the Valois kings of France?1 And, for that matter, what chances would Marx have had under a system in which all the means of communication had been in the hands of the governments?

Whoever wants freedom of conscience must abhor socialism. Of course, freedom enables a man not only to do the good things but also to do the wrong things. But no moral value can be ascribed to an action, however good, that has been performed under the pressure of an omnipotent government.

• 1Charles V of Germany (1500-1558), a devoted Catholic, persecuted religious heresy in the Netherlands and struggled to suppress Lutheranism in the German principalities. During the reign of the Valois kings of France (1328-1589) religious wars were fought as French Protestants, including the Huguenots, struggled for freedom of worship.

The words freedom and liberty signified for the most eminent representatives of mankind one of the most precious and desirable goods. Today it is fashionable to sneer at them. They are, trumpets the modern sage, “slippery” notions and “bourgeois” prejudices.

Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to which these terms could be meaningfully applied. Whatever man does, he can never free himself from the restraints which nature imposes upon him. If he wants to succeed in acting, he must submit unconditionally to the laws of nature.

Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman relations. A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people. In the frame of society everybody depends upon his fellow citizens. Social man cannot become independent without forsaking all the advantages of social cooperation.

The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart?human cooperation.

Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and productive than isolated action of self-sufficient individuals. The natural conditions determining man’s life and effort are such that the division of labor increases output per unit of labor expended. These natural facts are:

1. the innate inequality of men with regard to their ability to perform various kinds of labor, and
2. the unequal distribution of the nature-given, nonhuman opportunities of production on the surface of the earth. One may as well consider these two facts as one and the same fact, namely, the manifoldness of nature which makes the universe a complex of infinite varieties.

Innate Inequality

The division of labor is the outcome of man’s conscious reaction to the multiplicity of natural conditions. On the other hand, it is itself a factor bringing about differentiation. It assigns to the various geographic areas specific functions in the complex of the processes of production. It makes some areas urban, others rural; it locates the various branches of manufacturing, mining, and agriculture in different places. Still more important, however, is the fact that it intensifies the innate inequality of men. Exercise and practice of specific tasks adjust individuals better to the requirements of their performance; men develop some of their inborn faculties and stunt the development of others. Vocational types emerge, people become specialists.

The division of labor splits the various processes of production into minute tasks, many of which can be performed by mechanical devices. It is this fact that made the use of machinery possible and brought about the amazing improvements in technical methods of production. Mechanization is the fruit of the division of labor, its most beneficial achievement, not its motive and fountain spring. Power-driven specialized machinery could be employed only in a social environment under the division of labor. Every step forward on the road toward the use of more specialized, more refined, and more productive machines requires a further specialization of tasks.

Within Society

Seen from the point of view of the individual, society is the great means for the attainment of all his ends. The preservation of society is an essential condition of any plans an individual may want to realize by any action whatever. Even the refractory delinquent who fails to adjust his conduct to the requirements of life within the societal system of cooperation does not want to miss any of the advantages derived from the division of labor. He does not consciously aim at the destruction of society. He wants to lay his hands on a greater portion of the jointly produced wealth than the social order assigns to him. He would feel miserable if antisocial behavior were to become universal and its inevitable outcome, the return to primitive indigence, resulted.

Liberty and freedom are the conditions of man within a contractual society. Social cooperation under a system of private ownership of the means of production means that within the range of the market the individual is not bound to obey and to serve an overlord. As far as he gives and serves other people, he does so of his own accord in order to be rewarded and served by the receivers. He exchanges goods and services, he does not do compulsory labor and does not pay tribute. He is certainly not independent. He depends on the other members of society. But this dependence is mutual. The buyer depends on the seller and the seller on the buyer.

Self-Interest

The main concern of many writers of the 19th and 20th centuries was to misrepresent and to distort this obvious state of affairs. The workers, they said, are at the mercy of their employers. Now, it is true that the employer has the right to fire the employee. But if he makes use of this right in order to indulge in his whims, he hurts his own interests. It is to his own disadvantage if he discharges a better man in order to hire a less efficient one. The market does not directly prevent anybody from arbitrarily inflicting harm on his fellow citizens; it only puts a penalty upon such conduct. The shopkeeper is free to be rude to his customers provided he is ready to bear the consequences. The consumers are free to boycott a purveyor provided they are ready to pay the costs. What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow men and curbs innate tendencies toward arbitrariness and malice is, in the market, not compulsion and coercion on the part of gardeess, hangmen, and penal courts; it is self-interest. The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity. For the rest he is free in the range of the market.

In the market economy the individual is free to act within the orbit of private property and the market. His choices are final. For his fellow men his actions are data which they must take into account in their own acting. The coordination of the autonomous actions of all individuals is accomplished by the operation of the market. Society does not tell a man what to do and what not to do. There is no need to enforce cooperation by special orders or prohibitions. Non-cooperation penalizes itself. Adjustment to the requirements of society’s productive effort and the pursuit of the individual’s own concerns are not in conflict. Consequently no agency is required to settle such conflicts. The system can work and accomplish its tasks without the interference of an authority issuing special orders and prohibitions and punishing those who do not comply.

Compulsion and Coercion

Beyond the sphere of private property and the market lies the sphere of compulsion and coercion; here are the dams which organized society has built for the protection of private property and the market against violence, malice, and fraud. This is the realm of constraint as distinguished from the realm of freedom. Here are rules discriminating between what is legal and what is illegal, what is permitted and what is prohibited. And here is a grim machine of arms, prisons, and gallows and the men operating it, ready to crush those who dare to disobey.

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gardeess, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Liberty and freedom are terms employed for the description of the social conditions of the individual members of a market society in which the power of the indispensable hegemonic bond, the state, is curbed lest the operation of the market be endangered. In a totalitarian system there is nothing to which the attribute “free” could be attached but the unlimited arbitrariness of the dictator.

There would be no need to dwell upon this obvious fact if the champions of the abolition of liberty had not purposely brought about a semantic confusion. They realized that it was hopeless for them to fight openly and sincerely for restraint and servitude. The notions liberty and freedom had such prestige that no propaganda could shake their popularity. Since time immemorial in the realm of Western civilization, liberty has been considered as the most precious good. What gave to the West its eminence was precisely its concern about liberty, a social ideal foreign to the oriental peoples. The social philosophy of the Occident is essentially a philosophy of freedom. The main content of the history of Europe and the communities founded by European emigrants and their descendants in other parts of the world was the struggle for liberty. “Rugged” individualism is the signature of our civilization. No open attack upon the freedom of the individual had any prospect of success.

New Definitions

Thus the advocates of totalitarianism chose other tactics. They reversed the meaning of words. They call true or genuine liberty the condition of the individuals under a system in which they have no right other than to obey orders. They call themselves true liberals because they strive after such a social order. They call democracy the Russian methods of dictatorial government. They call the labor union methods of violence and coercion “industrial democracy.” They call freedom of the press a state of affairs in which only the government is free to publish books and newspapers. They define liberty as the opportunity to do the “right” things, and, of course, they arrogate to themselves the determination of what is right and what is not. In their eyes government omnipotence means full liberty. To free the police power from all restraints is the true meaning of their struggle for freedom.

The market economy, say these self-styled liberals, grants liberty only to a parasitic class of exploiters, the bourgeoisie; that these scoundrels enjoy the freedom to enslave the masses; that the wage earner is not free; that he must toil for the sole benefit of his masters, the employers; that the capitalists appropriate to themselves what according to the inalienable rights of man should belong to the worker; that under socialism the worker will enjoy freedom and human dignity because he will no longer have to slave for a capitalist; that socialism means the emancipation of the common man, means freedom for all; that it means, moreover, riches for all.

These doctrines have been able to triumph because they did not encounter effective rational criticism. It is useless to stand upon an alleged “natural” right of individuals to own property if other people assert that the foremost “natural” right is that of income equality. Such disputes can never be settled. It is beside the point to criticize nonessential, attendant features of the socialist program. One does not refute socialism by attacking the socialist stand on religion, marriage, birth control, and art.

A New Subterfuge

In spite of these serious shortcomings of the defenders of economic freedom it was impossible to fool all the people all the time about the essential features of socialism. The most fanatical planners were forced to admit that their projects involve the abolition of many freedoms people enjoy under capitalism and “plutodemocracy.” Pressed hard, they resorted to a new subterfuge. The freedom to be abolished, they emphasize, is merely the spurious “economic” freedom of the capitalists that harms the common man; that outside the “economic sphere” freedom will not only be fully preserved, but considerably expanded. “Planning for Freedom” has lately become, the most popular slogan of the champions of totalitarian government and the Russification of all nations.

The fallacy of this argument stems from the spurious distinction between two realms of human life and action, the “economic” sphere and the “noneconomic” sphere. Strictly speaking, people do not long for tangible goods as such, but for the services which these goods are fitted to render them. They want to attain the increment in well-being which these services are able to convey. It is a fact that people, in dealing on the market, are motivated not only by the desire to get food, shelter, and sexual enjoyment, but also by manifold “ideal” urges. Acting man is always concerned both with “material” and “ideal” things. He chooses between various alternatives, no matter whether they are to be classified as material or ideal. In the actual scales of value, material and ideal things are jumbled together.

Freedom, as people enjoyed it in the democratic countries of Western civilization in the years of the old liberalism’s triumph, was not a product of constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and statutes. Those documents aimed only at safeguarding liberty and freedom, firmly established by the operation of the market economy, against encroachments on the part of officeholders. No government and no civil law can guarantee and bring about freedom otherwise than by supporting and defending the fundamental institutions of the market economy. Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

Competition

The freedom of man under capitalism is an effect of competition. The worker does not depend on the good graces of an employer. If his employer discharges him, he finds another employer. The consumer is not at the mercy of the shopkeeper. He is free to patronize another shop if he likes. Nobody must kiss other people’s hands or fear their disfavor. Interpersonal relations are businesslike. The exchange of goods and services is mutual; it is not a favor to sell or to buy, it is a transaction dictated by selfishness on either side.

It is true that in his capacity as a producer every man depends either directly, as does the entrepreneur, or indirectly, as does the hired worker, on the demands of the consumers. However, this dependence upon the supremacy of the consumers is not unlimited. If a man has a weighty reason for defying the sovereignty of the consumers, he can try it. There is in the range of the market a very substantial and effective right to resist oppression. Nobody is forced to go into the liquor industry or into a gun factory if his conscience objects. He may have to pay a price for his conviction; there are in this world no ends the attainment of which is gratuitous. But it is left to a man’s own decision to choose between a material advantage and the call of what he believes to be his duty. In the market economy the individual alone is the supreme arbiter in matters of his satisfaction.

Consumers Choose

Capitalist society has no means of compelling a man to change his occupation or his place of work other than to reward those complying with the wants of the consumers by higher pay. It is precisely this kind of pressure that many people consider as unbearable and hope to see abolished under socialism. They are too dull to realize that the only alternative is to convey to the authorities full power to determine in what branch and at what place a man should work.

In his capacity as a consumer man is no less free. He alone decides what is more and what is less important for him. He chooses how to spend his money according to his own will.

The substitution of economic planning for the market economy removes all freedom and leaves to the individual merely the right to obey. The authority directing all economic matters controls all aspects of a man’s life and activities. It is the only employer. All labor becomes compulsory labor because the employee must accept what the chief deigns to offer him. The economic tsar determines what and how much the consumer may consume. There is no sector of human life in which a decision is left to the individual’s value judgments. The authority assigns a definite task to him, trains him for this job, and employs him at the place and in the manner it deems expedient.

The “Planned” Life Is Not Free

As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug. Habeas corpus and trial by jury are a sham if, under the pretext of economic expediency, the authority has full power to relegate every citizen it dislikes to the arctic or to a desert and to assign him “hard labor” for life. Freedom of the press is a mere blind if the authority controls all printing offices and paper plants. And so are all the other rights of men.

A man has freedom as far as he shapes his life according to his own plans. A man whose fate is determined by the plans of a superior authority, in which the exclusive power to plan is vested, is not free in the sense in which the term “free” was used and understood by all people until the semantic revolution of our day brought about a confusion of tongues.

Excerpts from Human Action Reprinted from the pamphlet published by the Foundation for Economic Education in 1952, with the permission of the publisher.

A long line of eminent authors, beginning with Adam Ferguson* tried to grasp the characteristic feature that distinguishes the modern capitalistic society, the market economy, from the older systems of the arrangement of social cooperation. They distinguished between warlike nations and commercial nations, between societies of a militant structure and those of individual freedom, between the society based on status and that based on contract. The appreciation of each of the two “ideal types” was, of course, different with the various authors. But they all agreed in establishing the contrast between the two types of social cooperation as well as in the cognition that no third principle of the arrangement of social affairs is thinkable and feasible.1 One may disagree with some of the characteristics that they ascribed to each of the two types, but one must admit that the classification as such makes us comprehend essential facts of history as well as of contemporary social conflicts.

There are several reasons that prevent a full understanding of the significance of the distinction between these two types of society. There is in the first place the popular repugnance to assign to the inborn inequality of various individuals its due importance. There is furthermore the failure to realize the fundamental difference that exists between the meaning and the effects of private ownership of the means of production in the precapitalistic and in the capitalistic society. Finally, there is serious confusion brought about by the ambiguous employment of the term “economic power.”

Inborn Inequality

The doctrine that ascribed all differences between individuals to postnatal influences is untenable. The fact that human beings are born unequal in regard to physical and mental capacities is not denied by any reasonable man, certainly also not by pediatrists. Some individuals surpass their fellow men in health and vigor, in brain power and aptitude for various performances, in energy and resolution. Some people are better fit for the pursuit of earthly affairs, some less. From this point of view we may—without indulging in any judgment of value—distinguish between superior and inferior men. Karl Marx referred to “the inequality of individual endowment and therefore productive capacity (Leistungsfähigkeit) as natural privileges” and was fully aware of the fact that men “would not be different individuals if they were not unequal.”2

In the precapitalistic ages the better endowed, the “superior” people, took advantage of their superiority by seizing power and enthralling the masses of weaker, i.e., “inferior” men. Victorious warriors appropriated to themselves all the land available for hunting and fishing, cattle raising and tilling. Nothing was left to the rest of the people than to serve the princes and their retinue. They were serfs and slaves, landless and penniless underlings.

Such was by and large the state of affairs in most parts of the world in the ages in which the “heroes”3  were supreme and “commercialism” was absent. But then, in a process that, although again and again frustrated by a renascence of the spirit of violence, went on for centuries and is still going on, the spirit of business, i.e., of peaceful cooperation under the principle of the division of labor, undermined the mentality of the “good old days.” Capitalism—the market economy—radically transformed the economic and political organization of mankind.

In the precapitalistic society the superior men knew no other method of utilizing their own superiority than to subdue the masses of inferior people. But under capitalism the more able and more gifted men can profit from their superiority only by serving to the best of their abilities the wishes and wants of the majority of less gifted men.

In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Consumers determine, by their buying or abstention from buying, what should be produced, by whom and how, of what quality and in what quantity. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and landowners who fail to satisfy in the best possible and cheapest way the most urgent of the not yet satisfied wishes of the consumers are forced to go out of business and forfeit their preferred position. In business offices and in laboratories the keenest minds are busy fructifying the most complex achievements of scientific research for the production of ever better implements and gadgets for people who have no inkling of the scientific theories that make the fabrication of such things possible. The bigger an enterprise is, the more it is forced to adjust its production activities to the changing whims and fancies of the masses, its masters. The fundamental principle of capitalism is mass production to supply the masses. It is the patronage of the masses that makes enterprises grow into bigness. The common man is supreme in the market economy. He is the customer “who is always right.”

In the political sphere representative government is the corollary of the supremacy of the consumers in the market. The officeholders depend on the voters in a way similar to that in which the entrepreneurs and investors depend on the consumers. The same historical process that substituted the capitalistic mode of production for precapitalistic methods substituted popular government—democracy—for royal absolutism and other forms of government by the few. And wherever the market economy is superseded by socialism, autocracy makes a comeback. It does not matter whether the socialist or communist despotism is camouflaged by the use of aliases such as “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “people’s democracy” or “F​ührer (leader) principle.” It always amounts to a subjection of the many to the few.

It is hardly possible to misconstrue more improperly the state of affairs prevailing in the capitalistic society than by dubbing the capitalists and entrepreneurs a “ruling” class intent upon “exploiting” the masses of decent men. We do not have to raise the question as to how the men who under capitalism are businessmen would have tried to take advantage of their superior talents in any other thinkable organization of production activities. Under capitalism they are vying with one another in serving the masses of less gifted men. All their thoughts aim at perfecting the methods of supplying the consumers. Every year, every month, every week, something unheard of before appears on the market and is very soon made accessible to the many. Precisely because they are producing for profit, the businessmen are producing for the use of the consumers.

Confusion Concerning Property

The second deficiency of the customary treatment of the problems of society’s economic organization is the confusion produced by the indiscriminate employment of juridical concepts, first of all the concept of private property.

In the precapitalistic ages there prevailed by and large economic self-sufficiency, first of every household, later—with the gradual progress toward commercialism—of small regional units. The much greater part of all products did not reach the market. They were consumed without having been sold and bought. Under such conditions there was no essential difference between private ownership of producers’ goods and that of consumers’ goods. In each case property served the owner exclusively. To own something, whether a producers’ good or a consumers’ good, meant to have it for oneself alone and to deal with it for one’s own satisfaction.

But it is different in the frame of a market economy. The owner of producers’ goods, the capitalist, can derive advantage from his ownership only by employing them for the best possible satisfaction of the wants of the consumers. In the market economy property in the means of production is acquired and preserved by serving the public and is lost if the public becomes dissatisfied with the way in which it is served. Private property of the material factors of production is a public mandate, as it were, which is withdrawn as soon as the consumers think that other people would employ the capital goods more efficiently for their, viz., the consumers’, benefit. By the instrumentality of the profit and loss system the capitalists are forced to deal with “their” property as if it were other people’s property entrusted to them under the obligation to utilize it for the best possible provision of the virtual beneficiaries, the consumers. This real meaning of private ownership of the material factors of production under capitalism could be ignored and misinterpreted because all people—economists, lawyers, and laymen—had been led astray by the fact that the legal concept of property as developed by the juridical practices and doctrines of precapitalistic ages has been retained unchanged or only slightly altered while its effective meaning has been radically transformed.4

In the feudal society the economic situation of every individual was determined by the share allotted to him by the powers that be. The poor man was poor because little land or no land at all had been given to him. He could with good reason think (to say it openly would have been too dangerous): “I am poor because other people have more than a fair share.” But in the frame of a capitalistic society the accumulation of additional capital by those who succeeded in utilizing their funds for the best possible provision of the consumers enriches not only the owners but all of the people, on the one hand by raising the marginal productivity of labor and thereby wages, and on the other hand by increasing the quantity of goods produced and brought to the market. The peoples of the economically backward countries are poorer than the Americans because their countries lack a sufficient number of successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.

A tendency toward an improvement of the standard of living of the masses can prevail only when and where the accumulation of new capital outruns the increase in population figures.

The formation of capital is a process performed with the cooperation of the consumers: only those entrepreneurs can earn surpluses whose activities best satisfy the public. And the utilization of the once accumulated capital is directed by the anticipation of the most urgent of the not yet fully satisfied wishes of the consumers. Thus capital comes into existence and is employed according to the wishes of the consumers.

Two Kinds of Power

When in dealing with market phenomena we apply the term “power,” we must be fully aware of the fact that we are employing it with a connotation that is entirely different from the traditional connotation attached to it in dealing with issues of government and affairs of state.

Governmental power is the faculty to beat into submission all those who would dare to disobey the orders issued by the authorities. Nobody would call government an entity that lacks this faculty. Every governmental action is backed by constables, prison guards, and executioners. However beneficial a governmental action may appear, it is ultimately made possible only by the government’s power to compel its subjects to do what many of them would not do if they were not threatened by the police and the penal courts. A government-supported hospital serves charitable purposes. But the taxes collected that enable the authorities to spend money for the upkeep of the hospital are not paid voluntarily. The citizens pay taxes because not to pay them would bring them to prison and physical resistance to the revenue agents could bring them to the gallows.

It is true that the majority of the people willy-nilly acquiesce in this state of affairs and, as David Hume**  put it, “resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.” They proceed in this way because they think that in the long run they serve better their own interests by being loyal to their government than by overturning it. But this does not alter the fact that governmental power means the exclusive faculty to frustrate any disobedience by the recourse to violence. As human nature is, the institution of government is an indispensable means to make civilized life possible. The alternative is anarchy and the law of the stronger. But the fact remains that government is the power to imprison and to kill.

The concept of economic power as applied by the socialist authors means something entirely different. The fact to which it refers is the capacity to influence other people’s behavior by offering them something the acquisition of which they consider as more desirable than the avoidance of the sacrifice they have to make for it. In plain words: it means the invitation to enter into a bargain, an act of exchange. I will give you a if you give me b. There is no question of any compulsion nor of any threats. The buyer does not “rule” the seller and the seller does not “rule” the buyer.

Of course, in the market economy everybody’s style of life is adjusted to the division of labor, and a return to self-sufficiency is out of the question. Everybody’s bare survival would be jeopardized if he were forced suddenly to experience the autarky of ages gone by. But in the regular course of market transactions there is no danger of such a relapse into the conditions of the primeval household economy. A faint image of the effects of any disturbance in the usual course of market exchanges is provided when labor union violence, benevolently tolerated or even openly encouraged and aided by the government, stops the activities of vital branches of business.

In the market economy every specialist—and there are no other people than specialists—depends on all other specialists. This mutuality is the characteristic feature of interpersonal relations under capitalism. The socialists ignore the fact of mutuality and speak of economic power. For example, as they see it, “the capacity to determine product” is one of the powers of the entrepreneur.5  One can hardly misconstrue more radically the essential features of the market economy. It is not business, but the consumers who ultimately determine what should be produced. It is a silly fable that nations go to war because there is a munitions industry and that people are getting drunk because the distillers have “economic power.” If one calls economic power the capacity to choose—or, as the socialists prefer to say, to “determine”—the product, one must establish the fact that this power is fully vested in the buyers and consumers.

“Modern civilization, nearly all civilization,” said the great British economist Edwin Cannan, “is based on the principle of making things pleasant for those who please the market and unpleasant for those who fail to do so.”6  The market, that means the buyers; the consumers, that means all of the people. To the contrary, under planning or socialism the goals of production are determined by the supreme planning authority; the individual gets what the authority thinks he ought to get. All this empty talk about the economic power of business aims at obliterating this fundamental distinction between freedom and bondage.

The “Power” of the Employer

People refer to economic power also in describing the internal conditions prevailing within the various enterprises. The owner of a private firm or the president of a corporation, it is said, enjoys within his outfit absolute power. He is free to indulge in his whims and fancies. All employees depend on his arbitrariness. They must stoop and obey or else face dismissal and starvation.

Such observations, too, ascribe to the employer powers that are vested in the consumers. The requirement to outstrip its competitors by serving the public in the cheapest and best possible way enjoins upon every enterprise the necessity to employ the personnel best fitted for the performance of the various functions entrusted to them. The individual enterprise must try to outdo its competitors not only by the employment of the most suitable methods of production and the purchase of the best fitted materials, but also by hiring the right type of workers. It is true that the head of an enterprise has the faculty to give vent to his sympathies or antipathies. He is free to prefer an inferior man to a better man; he may fire a valuable assistant and in his place employ an incompetent and inefficient substitute. But all the faults he commits in this regard affect the profitability of his enterprise. He has to pay for them in full. It is the very supremacy of the market that penalizes such capricious behavior. The market forces the entrepreneurs to deal with every employee exclusively from the point of view of the services he renders to the satisfaction of the consumers.

What curbs in all market transactions the temptation of indulging in malice and venom is precisely the costs involved in such behavior. The consumer is free to boycott for some reasons, popularly called noneconomic or irrational, the purveyor who would in the best and cheapest way satisfy his wants. But then he has to bear the consequences; he will either be less perfectly served or he will have to pay a higher price. Civil government enforces its commandments by recourse to violence or the threat of violence. The market does not need any recourse to violence because neglect of its rationality penalizes itself.

The critics of capitalism fully acknowledge this fact in pointing out that for private enterprise nothing counts but the striving after profit. Profit can be made only by satisfying the consumers better or cheaper or better and cheaper, than others do. The consumer has in his capacity as customer the right to be full of whim and fancies. The businessman qua producer has only one aim: to provide for the consumer. If one deplores the businessman’s unfeeling preoccupation with profit-seeking, one has to realize two things. First, that this attitude is prescribed to the entrepreneur by the consumers who are not prepared to accept any excuse for poor service. Secondly, that it is precisely this neglect of “the human angle” that prevents arbitrariness and partiality from affecting the employer-employee nexus.

To establish these facts does not amount either to a commendation or to a condemnation of the market economy or its political corollary, government by the people (representative government, democracy). Science is neutral with regard to any judgments of value. It neither approves nor condemns; it just describes and analyzes what is.

A Duty of the Elite

Stressing the fact that under unhampered capitalism the consumers are supreme in determining the goals of production does not imply any opinion about the moral and intellectual capacities of these individuals. The individuals qua consumers as well as qua voters are mortal men liable to error and may very often choose what in the long run will harm them. Philosophers may be right in severely criticizing the conduct of their fellow citizens. But there is, in a free society, no other means to avoid the evils resulting from one’s fellows’ bad judgment than to induce them to alter their ways of life voluntarily. Where there is freedom, this is the task incumbent upon the elite.

Men are unequal and the inherent inferiority of the many manifests itself also in the manner in which they enjoy the affluence capitalism bestows upon them. It would be a boon for mankind, say many authors, if the common man would spend less time and money for the satisfaction of vulgar appetites and more for higher and nobler gratifications. But should not distinguished critics rather blame themselves than the masses? Why did they, whom fate and nature have blessed with moral and intellectual eminence, not better succeed in persuading the masses of inferior people to drop their vulgar tastes and habits? If something is wrong with the behavior of the many, the fault rests no more with the inferiority of the masses than with the inability or unwillingness of the elite to induce all other people to accept their own higher standards of value. The serious crisis of our civilization is caused not only by the shortcomings of the masses. It is no less the effect of a failure of the elite.

Reprinted from The Freeman, January 1962.

• *Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), Scottish philosopher and historian, a contemporary and friend of Adam Smith (1723-1790).
• 1See Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), pp. 195-198.
• 2 Karl Marx, Critique of the Social-Democratic Program of Gotha (Letter to Bracke, May 5, 1875).
• 3Werner Sombart, <em>Händler und Helden</em> (<em>Hucksters and Heroes</em>) (Munich, 1915).
• 4It was the great Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus who first alluded to this characteristic feature of property of producers’ goods in a market economy. See Mises, <em>Socialism</em> (Yale, 1951), p. 42 n; (Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 31 n.
• **David Hume (1711-1776), prominent Scottish philosopher and historian. His skeptical philosophy had a profound influence on later thinkers.
• 5Cf. for instance, A. A. Berle, Jr., <em>Power without Property</em> (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Inc.), 1959, p. 82.
• 6Edwin Cannan, <em>An Economist’s Protest</em> (London: P. S. King & Son, Ltd., 1928), pp. vi-vii.

As the popular philosophy of the common man sees it, human wealth and welfare are the products of the cooperation of two primordial factors: nature and human labor. All the things that enable man to live and to enjoy life are supplied either by nature or by work or by a combination of nature-given opportunities with human labor. As nature dispenses its gifts gratuitously, it follows that all the final fruits of production, the consumers’ goods, ought to be allotted exclusively to the workers whose toil has created them. But unfortunately in this sinful world conditions are different. There the “predatory” classes of the “exploiters” want to reap although they have not sown. The landowners, the capitalists, and the entrepreneurs appropriate to themselves what by rights belongs to the workers who have produced it. All the evils of the world are the necessary effect of this originary wrong.

Such are the ideas that dominate the thinking of most of our contemporaries. The socialists and the syndicalists conclude that in order to render human affairs more satisfactory it is necessary to eliminate those whom their jargon calls the “robber barons,” i.e., the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the landowners, entirely; the conduct of all production affairs ought to be entrusted either to the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the state (in the Marxian terminology called Society), or to the men employed in the individual plants or branches of production.

Other people are more considerate in their reformist zeal. They do not intend to expropriate those whom they call the “leisure class” entirely. They want only to take away from them as much as is needed to bring about “more equality” in the “distribution” of wealth and income.

But both groups, the party of the thoroughgoing socialists and that of the more cautious reformers, agree on the basic doctrine according to which profit and interest are “unearned” income and therefore, morally objectionable. Both groups agree that profit and interest are the cause of the misery of the great majority of all honest workingmen and their families, and, in a decent and satisfactory organization of society, ought to be sharply curbed, if not entirely abolished.

Yet this whole interpretation of human conditions is fallacious. The policies engendered by it are pernicious from whatever point of view we may judge them. Western civilization is doomed if we do not succeed very soon in substituting reasonable methods of dealing with economic problems for the present disastrous methods.

Three Factors of Production

Mere work—that is, effort not guided by a rational plan and not aided by the employment of tools and intermediary products—brings about very little for the improvement of the worker’s condition. Such work is not a specifically human device. It is what man has in common with all other animals. It is bestirring oneself instinctively and using one’s bare hands to gather whatever is eatable and drinkable that can be found and appropriated.

Physical exertion turns into a factor of human production when it is directed by reason toward a definite end and employs tools and previously produced intermediary products. Mind?reason?is the most important equipment of man. In the human sphere, labor counts only as one item in a combination of natural resources, capital goods, and labor; all these three factors are employed, according to a definite plan devised by reason, for the attainment of an end chosen. Labor, in the sense in which this term is used in dealing with human affairs, is only one of several factors of production.

The establishment of this fact demolishes entirely all the theses and claims of the popular doctrine of exploitation. Those saving and thereby accumulating capital goods, and those abstaining from the consumption of previously accumulated capital goods, contribute their share to the outcome of the processes of production. Equally indispensable in the conduct of affairs is the role played by the human mind. Entrepreneurial judgment directs the toil of the workers and the employment of the capital goods toward the ultimate end of production, the best possible removal of what causes people to feel discontented and unhappy.

What distinguishes contemporary life in the countries of Western civilization from conditions as they prevailed in earlier ages—and still exist for the greater number of those living today—is not the changes in the supply of labor and the skill of the workers and not the familiarity with the exploits of pure science and their utilization by the applied sciences, by technology. It is the amount of capital accumulated. The issue has been intentionally obscured by the verbiage employed by the international and national government agencies dealing with what is called foreign aid for the underdeveloped countries. What these poor countries need in order to adopt the Western methods of mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses is not information about a “know how.” There is no secrecy about technological methods. They are taught at the technological schools and they are accurately described in textbooks, manuals, and periodical magazines. There are many experienced specialists available for the execution of every project that one may find practicable for these backward countries. What prevents a country like India from adopting the American methods of industry is the paucity of its supply of capital goods. As the Indian government’s confiscatory policies are deterring foreign capitalists from investing in India and as its prosocialist bigotry sabotages domestic accumulation of capital, their country depends on the alms that Western nations are giving to it.

Consumers Direct the Use of Capital

Capital goods come into existence by saving. A part of the goods produced is withheld from immediate consumption and employed for processes the fruits of which will only mature at a later date. All material civilization is based upon this “capitalistic” approach to the problems of production.

“Roundabout methods of production,” as Böhm-Bawerk*  called them, are chosen because they generate a higher output per unit of input. Early man lived from hand to mouth. Civilized man produces tools and intermediary products in the pursuit of long-range designs that finally bring forth results which direct, less time-consuming methods could never have attained, or could have attained only with an incomparably higher expenditure of labor and material factors,

Those saving?that is consuming less than their share of the goods produced?inaugurate progress toward general prosperity. The seed they have sown enriches not only themselves but also all other strata of society. It benefits the consumers.

The capital goods are for the owner a dead fund, a liability rather than an asset, if not used in production for the best possible and cheapest provision of the people with the goods and services they are asking for most urgently. In the market economy the owners of capital goods are forced to employ their property as if it were entrusted to them by the consumers under the stipulation to invest it in those lines in which it best serves those consumers. The capitalists are virtually mandataries of the consumers, bound to comply with their wishes.

In order to attend to the orders received from the consumers, their real bosses, the capitalists themselves must either themselves proceed to investment and the conduct of business or, if they are not prepared for such entrepreneurial activity or distrust their own abilities, hand over their funds to men whom they consider as better fitted for such a function. Whatever alternative they may choose, the supremacy of the consumers remains intact. No matter what the financial structure of the firm or company may be, the entrepreneur who operates with other people’s money depends no less on the market, that is, the consumers, than the entrepreneur who fully owns his outfit.

There is no other method to make wage rates rise than by investing more capital per worker. More investment of capital means: to give to the laborer more efficient tools. With the aid of better tools and machines, the quantity of the products increases and their quality improves. As the employer consequently will be in a position to obtain from the consumers more for what the employee has produced in one hour of work, he is able—and, by the competition of other employers, forced—to pay a higher price for the man’s work.

Intervention and Unemployment

As the labor union doctrine sees it, the wage increases that they are obtaining by what is euphemistically called “collective bargaining” are not to burden the buyers of the products but should be absorbed by the employers. The latter should cut down what in the eyes of the communists is called “unearned income,” that is, interest on the capital invested and the profits derived from success in filling wants of the consumers that until then had remained unsatisfied. Thus the unions hope to transfer step by step all this allegedly “unearned income” from the pockets of the capitalists and entrepreneurs into those of the employees.

What really happens on the market is, however, very different. At the market price m of the product p, all those who were prepared to spend m for a unit of p could buy as much as they wanted. The total quantity of p produced and offered for sale was s. It was not larger than s because with such a larger quantity the price, in order to clear the market, would have to drop below m to m-. But at this price of m- the producers with the highest costs would suffer losses and would thereby be forced to stop producing p. These marginal producers likewise incur losses and are forced to discontinue producing p if the wage increase enforced by the union (or by a governmental minimum wage decree) causes an increase of production costs not compensated by a rise in the price of m to m+. The resulting restriction of production necessitates a reduction of the labor force. The outcome of the union’s “victory” is the unemployment of a number of workers.

The result is the same if the employers are in a position to shift the increase in production costs fully to the consumers, without a drop in the quantity of p produced and sold. If the consumers are spending more for the purchase of p, they must cut down their buying of some other commodity q. Then the demand for q drops and brings about unemployment of a part of the men who were previously engaged in turning out q.

The union doctrine qualifies interest received by the owners of the capital invested in the enterprise as “unearned” and concludes that it could be abolished entirely or considerably shortened without any harm to the employees and the consumers. The rise in production costs caused by wage increases could therefore be borne by shortening the company’s net earnings and a corresponding reduction of the dividends paid to the shareholders. The same idea, is at the bottom of the unions’ claim that every increase in what they call productivity of labor (that is, the sum of the prices received for the total output divided by the number of man hours spent in its production) should be added to wages. Both methods mean confiscating for the benefit of the employees the whole or at least a considerable part of the returns on the capital provided by the saving of the capitalists. But what induces the capitalists to abstain from consuming their capital and to increase it by new saving is the fact that their forbearance is counterbalanced by the proceeds of their investments. If one deprives them of these proceeds, the only use they can make of the capital they own is to consume it and thus to inaugurate general progressive impoverishment.

The Only Sound Policy

What elevates the wage rates paid to the American workers above the rates paid in foreign countries is the fact that the investment of capital per worker is higher in this country than abroad. Saving, the accumulation of capital, has created and preserved up to now the high standard of living of the average American employee.

All the methods by which the federal government and the governments of the states, the political parties, and the unions are trying to improve the conditions of people anxious to earn wages and salaries are not only vain but directly pernicious. There is only one kind of policy that can effectively benefit the employees, namely, a policy that refrains from putting any obstacles in the way of further saving and accumulation of capital.

Reprinted from The Freeman, August 1963.

• *Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), Austrian economist, professor to Ludwig von Mises, renowned for his scholarly study of interest theory, <em>Capital and Interest</em>. Böhm-Bawerk also served as Finance Minister in the Austro-Hungarian government, 1895, 1897, and 1900-1904.

About 60 years ago Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) the great French sociologist, dealt with the problem of the popularization of luxuries. An industrial innovation, he pointed out, enters the market as the extravagance of an elite before it finally turns, step by step, into a need of each and all and is considered indispensable. What was once a luxury becomes in the course of time a necessity.

The history of technology and marketing provides ample exemplification to confirm Tarde’s thesis. There was in the past a considerable time lag between the emergence of something unheard of before and its becoming an article of everybody’s use. It sometimes took many centuries until an innovation was generally accepted at least within the orbit of Western civilization. Think of the slow popularization of the use of forks, of soap, of handkerchiefs, and of a great variety of other things.

From its beginnings capitalism displayed the tendency to shorten this time lag and finally to eliminate it almost entirely. This is not a merely accidental feature of capitalistic production; it is inherent in its very nature. Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses. Its characteristic mark is big scale production by big business. For big business there cannot be any question of producing limited quantities for the sole satisfaction of a small elite. The bigger big business becomes, the more and the quicker it makes accessible to the whole people the new achievements of technology.

Centuries passed before the fork turned from an implement of effeminate weaklings into a utensil of all people. The evolution of the motor car from a plaything of wealthy idlers into a universally used means of transportation required more than twenty years. But nylon stockings became, in this country, an article of every woman’s wear within hardly more than two or three years. There was practically no period in which the enjoyment of such innovations as television or the products of the frozen food industry was restricted to a small minority.

The disciples of Marx are anxious to describe in their textbooks the “unspeakable horrors of capitalism” which, as their master had prognosticated, results “with the inexorability of a law of nature” in the progressing impoverishment of the “masses.” Their prejudices prevent them from noticing the fact that capitalism tends, by the instrumentality of big-scale production, to wipe out the striking contrast between the mode of life of a fortunate elite and that of the rest of a nation.

The gulf that separated the man who traveled in a coach and six and the man who stayed at home because he lacked the fare has been reduced to the difference between Pullman, or first class, and coach travel.

Reprinted from the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration Newsletter, Volume 1, Number 4, Spring 1956

In the phrase, “protection of savers,” the word “protection” has a different meaning from that usually attributed to it in present-day political circles. Generally speaking, protection of the “little man” or of agriculture means protecting firms from competition on the market, at the expense of consumers. Privileges to advance the special interests of particular groups, at the expense of the entire population are recommended. Policies are proposed which must reduce total production.

Protection of savers and of savings involves something very different from this, namely, preservation of the very foundations of justice on which the capitalistic order of society is based and, consequently, of capitalism itself. The unprecedented increase in the standard of living of the masses in the capitalistic West is due to the fact that the formation of capital increased much more than the population. Real wages went up because the marginal productivity of capital goods went down in comparison with that of labor or, more popularly expressed, because the worker in a modern, well-equipped plant can produce many times more than can a worker with primitive tools.

Unrecognized Dangers

It was possible for savings and capital accumulation to increase on an ever larger scale in the West because the right of private property, in contrast to the arbitrary might of military and political rulers, had been firmly established as the result of a gradual development based on Roman law. Conditions in the constitutional state permitted sizeable accumulations of savings and capital investment. What separates West from East is precisely the idea which social reformers ridicule as the “sanctity” of property, and which has not penetrated the Orient at all.1  Capitalistic saving and investment cannot develop in lands where it is generally believed that the wealth of the businessman causes the poverty of the many, and where the successful trader is sacrificed to the predatory desires of the rulers and their representatives. The short interlude of “colonialism” and “imperialism” now belongs to history. One day, also, the United States will discontinue its gifts of billions to the enemies of capitalism. Many hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa will suffer increasing want because the policies of their governments obstruct domestic saving and capital formation and keep foreign capital out.

In view of the situation in the United States, there is certainly no cause to wonder that the Orientals lack understanding of the problem of capital creation and capital preservation. The fact that every year the quantity of newly accumulated capital in the United States far exceeds the amount consumed in production and otherwise used up is due neither to the policies of the government nor to the doctrines propagated by the universities, the two political parties and the press. It is a result of the fact that American capitalism still operates satisfactorily in spite of all the obstacles placed in its way under the misleading label of “welfare economics.”

The market economy under the directorship of the entrepreneur has never better demonstrated its unparalleled productivity than in its adaptation to this system so full of traps and snares. Still the official political economists, self-styled “Progressives,” misinterpret this great success of entrepreneurial initiative. Prejudiced by their socialistic ideas, they seek to discover in every improvement in the standard of living of the masses a new argument for the continuation of the New and Fair Deal reforms and the related policies of inflation and credit expansion through low interest rates.

For some time it has seemed that public opinion was beginning to recognize the dangers of continued inflation, and that this would lead to an end of the policy of credit expansion. Yet the Federal Reserve Banks’ interest rate was allowed to increase only slightly before a strong countermovement set in. Everyone protests that he is against inflation. Yet what is usually meant by “inflation” is not an increase in the supply of money and credit but an increase of prices. People do not want to hear that an increase in prices is the inevitable consequence of an increase in the money supply. To bolster purchasing power, they demand cheap credit and price ceilings.

After a period of decreased saving, the amount of new savings is once again rising in the United States. Also, the increase in the amount of life insurance taken out each year is considerable. Nevertheless it would be premature to conclude from this that the masses do not realize that the progressive decline in the dollar’s purchasing power is a threat to their savings and their provision for the future. However, there is no other possible means of saving open to the employee or worker, who is not familiar with business or the stock market. (Even the entirely insufficient makeshift of hoarding gold coins is in the United States illegal and practically impossible.2 ) The people cling to the hope that no further decline in the dollar’s purchasing power will take place.

“Do You Know That You Are a Creditor?”

The coming years will determine whether the United States, whose spokesmen never tire of noting that the American standard of living is much higher and better than that of any other time or place, will succeed in managing its finances without inflation or credit expansion. The number of persons is not large who fully recognize the dangers of government’s mislabelled “expansionist,” monetary policy, and only a few politicians are ready to listen to their words of warning. The “practical” person has no interest in “long run” policies. For him, nothing matters but the outcome of the next Congressional election, which is never more than two years off.

When National Socialism (Nazism) attained success in Germany with its slogan “Wipe out interest slavery!” one daily paper—I believe it was the Frankfurter Zeitung—carried an article under the headline “Do you know that you are a creditor?” The American “common man,” as a saver and especially as an owner of life insurance policies, is a creditor to a much greater degree than was the average German of the Weimar Republic. Still he is not aware of it. He trusts the inflationists who tell him that “cheap money” hurts only the “international bankers.” Just as he supports politicians, who spend billions in tax dollars to raise food prices, he is supporting a monetary policy that threatens his economic future.

There is only one way to improve the situation. That is to try to explain these matters to the voter.

Translated by Bettina Bien Greaves from the German, as it appeared in Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen (Volume X, Number 1), January 1, 1957, pp. 24-25.

• 1A rigid system of privilege and castes prevailed for centuries in China and Japan; wealth was a question of rank, and the common man had little opportunity to improve his situation. Savings in Japan and the other nations of the Pacific rim are a relatively recent development.
• 2For more than 40 years, from June 5, 1933, until December 31, 1974, U.S. citizens were denied the right to own monetary gold.

For every species of animals and plants the means of subsistence are limited. Hence every living being’s vital interests are implacably opposed to those of all members of its own species. Only human beings know how to overcome this irreconcilable nature-given conflict by embarking upon cooperation. The higher productivity of work performed under the principle of the division of labor substitutes for the grim antagonism created by the scarcity of food the solidarity of interests of people intentionally aiming at common goals. The peaceful exchange of commodities and services, the market process, becomes the standard type of interhuman relations. Mutual agreement of the parties displaces the recourse to violence, to the law of the stronger.

Cooperation versus Violence

The inherent deficiency of this method of solving mankind’s fundamental problem (and there is no other method available) is to be seen in the fact that it depends on full and unconditional cooperation of all human beings and can be frustrated by the non-cooperation of any individual. There is no other means available to eliminate violent interference with human affairs than the recourse to more powerful violence. Against individuals or groups of individuals who are resorting to violence or are not complying with their obligations resulting from contracts nothing avails but the recourse to violent action. The market system of voluntary agreements cannot work if not backed up by an apparatus of compulsion and coercion ready to resort to violence against individuals who are not strictly abiding by the terms and rules of mutual agreement. The market needs the support of the state.

The market in the broadest sense of the term is the process that encompasses all voluntary and spontaneous actions of men. It is the realm of human initiative and freedom and the soil upon which all human achievements thrive.

The state, the power protecting the market against destructive recourse to violence, is a grim apparatus of coercion and compulsion. It is a system of orders and prohibitions, and its armed servants are always ready to enforce these laws. Whatever the state does, is done by those subject to its commands. State power forced its subjects to build pyramids and other monuments, hospitals, research institutes, and schools. People see these achievements and praise their authors to the skies. They do not see the buildings that state power destroyed. Nor do they see those structures that were never constructed because the government had taxed away the means that individual citizens had destined for their erection.

There is today practically no limit to the peoples’ and their rulers’ pro-statist or, as one says today, pro-socialist enthusiasm. Hardly anybody is courageous enough to raise objections if some expansion of state power?popularly styled the “public sector of the economy”?is suggested. What slows down and in most fields almost stops the progress toward more socialization of business enterprises is the manifest financial failure of almost all nationalization and municipalization ventures. In this regard reference to the U.S. Post Office plays an important role in present-day social philosophies and economic policies. Its well-known inefficiency and its enormous financial deficit demolish the popular fables about the virtues of the conduct of affairs by the state, the social apparatus of violent action.

It is impossible to defend honestly the case for violence against the case for peaceful cooperation. Thus the advocates of violence are resorting to the trick of calling the methods of violence and threat of violence to which they resort “nonviolence.” The outstanding case is that of labor-unionism. Its essential procedure, the use of violent action of various kinds1  or the threat of such action, is to prevent enterprises from working with the aid of people who do not obey the unions’ orders. They have succeeded in giving to the military term “picketing” a “peaceful” connotation. Yet, precisely in the way they apply it, it includes the willingness to kill and destroy by brute force.

The fundamental antagonism between the realm of mutual peaceful agreement and that of compulsion and coercion cannot be eradicated by idle talk about two “sectors” of the economy, the private and the public. There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity. The attempts to resuscitate the totalitarianism of the Pharaohs of Egypt or of the Incas of Peru are doomed. And violence does not lose its antisocial character by being rebaptized “non-violence.” All that man has created was a product of voluntary human cooperation. All that violence has contributed to civilization consists in the?certainly indispensable?services it renders to the endeavors of peace-loving people to restrain potential peace-breakers.

Socialist Planning

Western civilization appreciates and always appreciated liberty as the greatest good. The history of the West is a record of struggles against tyranny and for freedom. In the 19th century the idea of the individual’s freedom as developed by the ancient Greeks and resuscitated by the Europeans of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment seemed even to work upon the backward people of the East. Optimists were talking about a coming age of freedom and peace.

What really happened was just the opposite. The 19th century, very successful in the natural sciences and their technological utilization, begot and made popular social doctrines that depicted the total state as the ultimate design of human history. Pious Christians as well as radical atheists rejected the market economy, vilifying it as the worst of all evils. While capitalism increased the productivity of economic effort in an unprecedented degree and the standard of living of the masses in the capitalistic countries improved from year to year, the Marxian doctrine of the unavoidable progressive pauperization of the “exploited classes” was accepted as an incontestable dogma. Self-styled intellectuals, yearning and striving hard for what they style the dictatorship of the proletariat, pretend to continue the endeavors of all the great champions of freedom.

The social and political ideal of our age is planning. No longer should the individuals have the right and the opportunity of choosing the mode of their integration into the system of social cooperation. Everybody will have to comply with the orders issued by society’s?i.e., the state’s, the police-power’s?supreme office. From the cradle to the coffin everybody will be forced to behave precisely as he is ordered to behave by the makers of the “plan.” These orders will determine his training and the place and the kind of his work as well as the wages he will receive. He will not be in a position to raise any objections against the orders received; according to the philosophy underlying the system, the planning authority alone is in a position to know whether or not the order is or is not in accordance with its plan for the “socially” most desirable conduct of affairs.

The total enslavement of all members of society is not a merely accidental attendant phenomenon of the socialist management. It is rather the essential feature of the socialist system, the very effect of any thinkable kind of a socialist conduct of business. It is precisely this that the socialist authors had in mind when they stigmatized capitalism as “anarchy of production” and asked for the transfer of all authority and power to “society.” Either a man is free to live according to his own plan or he is forced to submit unconditionally to the plan of the great god state.

It does not matter that the socialists call themselves today “leftists” and smear the advocates of limited government and the market economy as “rightists.” These terms “left” and “right” have lost any political significance. The only meaningful distinction is that between the advocates of the market economy and its corollary, limited government, and the advocates of the total state.

For the first time in human history there is perfect agreement between the majority of the so-called intellectuals and the vast majority of all other classes and groups of people. Passionately and vehemently they all want planning, i.e., their own total enslavement.

Individual Freedom and the Market Economy

The characteristic feature of the capitalistic society is the sphere of activity it assigns to the initiative and responsibility of its members. The individual is free and supreme as long as he does not restrict the freedom of his fellow citizens in pursuance of his own ends. In the market he is sovereign in his capacity as a consumer. In the governmental sphere he is a voter and in this capacity a part of the sovereign lawgiver. Political democracy and democracy of the market are congeneric. In the terminology of Marxism one would have to say: Representative government is the superstructure of the market economy as despotism is the superstructure of socialism.

The market economy is not merely one of various thinkable and possible systems of mankind’s economic cooperation. It is the only method that enables man to establish a social system of production to which the unswerving tendency is inwrought to aim at the best possible and cheapest provisioning of the consumers.

Reprinted from Mises’s original manuscript, first published in German translation in Schweizer Monatshefte, 48:1. April 1968, pp. 13-16.

• 1Cf. Roscoe Pound, <em>Legal Immunities of Labor Unions</em> (Washington, D.C., American Enterprise Association, 1957).

Writing in 1817, David Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation pointed to the experience that “the fancied or real insecurity of capital, when not under the immediate control of its owner” checks the emigration of capital. Thus most men of property prefer a low rate of profit in their own country to a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations.1  This was said precisely on the eve of the age that will be remembered in history as the period in which the insulation of the various local and national markets gave way to the evolution of an effective world trade not only in consumers’ goods but also in capital goods.

Foreign Investment

British capitalists inaugurated the new methods of foreign investment; they were very soon followed by the businessmen of Western and Central Europe and of the United States. An unprecedented improvement in the average standard of living resulted. Observing the benefits that this system brought both to the investors and to the people of the countries in which the investments were made, optimists hopefully looked forward to the coming of an era of perpetual peace and goodwill among all nations. They were poor prophets.

They overrated the mental power and they underrated the malicious envy not only of the uncultured masses but no less of the crowd of self-styled intellectuals. They did not foresee that in the light of doctrines, elaborated in England and France and perfected in Germany and Russia, foreign investors would appear as the worst enemies of all decent people, as exploiters and usurers. They could not divine the impetuous vehemence of the passions stirred up by unscrupulous demagogues. The Americans and the British are hated in the economically underdeveloped countries because they have provided the capital for investments the inhabitants were not able to provide.

Every account of the history of modern culture must first of all distinguish between two groups of nations, viz. those that have developed a system which made domestic saving and the large-scale accumulation of capital possible and those that did not. The lamentable failure of all “leftist” economic doctrines from Saint-Simonism and Marxism down to the “imperialism” theory of Luxembourg, Lenin and Hilferding and to Keynesianism is precisely to be seen in their misconstruction of the meaning of saving, capital accumulation, and investment.*  In the great ideological conflict of the nineteenth century the Liberals and their spokesmen, the much abused “vulgar economists,” were right in proclaiming as their main thesis: there is but one means to improve the material conditions of all of the people, viz., to accelerate the accumulation of capital as against the increase in population.

The great age of foreign investment came to an inglorious end when the 20th century’s doctrinaires were no longer prepared to see any difference between the devastation of a country by military action and the investment of foreign capital for the construction of factories and transportation facilities. Each of these two entirely different procedures is called conquest and imperialism. The expropriation of foreign investments is styled “liberation.” It is, if at all, only mildly censured by the jurists and economists of the “capitalistic sector” of the world. No wonder, that the eagerness to invest in foreign countries disappeared. Foreign aid tries now to fill the gap. As Miss Ayn Rand defined it, this new doctrine requests that our wealth should be given away to the peoples of Asia and Africa, “with apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they haven’t.”2

The joint operation of the ideas of socialism and nationalism has not only almost entirely suppressed saving and the accumulation of capital (for nonmilitary purposes) in the communist countries and in the orbit of the nations commonly called today underdeveloped. It made the industrial countries of Western and Central Europe and North America adopt conceptions the application of which must sooner or later result in the complete cessation of any voluntary saving and capital formation on the part of individual citizens.

The “Productivity of Labor”

Thus the official doctrine of the United States operates with a concept of productivity of labor that defines it as the market value (in terms of money) added to the products by the processing (of the firm in question or by all the firms of the branch of industry), divided by the number of workers employed. Or, in other words, output per man-hour of work. It pretends that every improvement in this figure means an “increase in the productivity of labor” that is caused by the workers’ effort and which by rights belongs entirely to them. In wage negotiations the unions claim this “productivity gain” as their members’ due. The employers as a rule neither question this concept of productivity of labor nor do they contest the resulting claims of the unions. They accept it implicitly in occasionally pointing out that wage rates have already risen to the extent of the increase in productivity, computed according to this method. The government in formulating its “guide lines” for the determination of wage rates and product prices adopts the unions’ point of view.

It is obvious that the theory underlying this doctrine radically misconstrues the essential facts about industrial production. The difference between the “productivity” of a worker handling the tools of a bygone state of technology and another working in a plant equipped with the most modern machines is not due to the personal qualities and the effort of the worker but to the quality of the shop’s equipment. If the worker is to get all the “increase in productivity” brought about by the investment of additional capital, nothing is left for the people whose saving created this capital and made its investment possible. (For the sake of simplicity we may omit referring to the role of the entrepreneurs and to that of the managers and the technologists.) Saving, capital accumulation and investment will no longer pay and will come to an end. There will no longer be any economic progress.3

Anti-Capitalistic Ideas

It cannot be denied that also in the noncommunist countries an outspoken anticapitalistic tendency prevails in fiscal policies. The taxation of personal incomes, corporations and inheritance tends more or less openly toward a complete confiscation of such allegedly “unearned” intake. The joint effects of these anti-capitalistic measures are to some extent still veiled by inflationary monetary and banking policies. But sooner or later the main problem will become visible: how to provide for new additional investments when the individuals and corporations are prevented—either by the methods of taxation or by the methods applied to the determination of wage rates—from deriving any benefit from saving and capital investment.

Reprinted from 75th anniversary issue of Farmand (Oslo, Norway), February 12, 1966.

• 1Cf. Ricardo, <em>Works</em>, ed. by McCulloch, 2nd ed., London 1852, p. 77.
• *Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), founder of French socialism; Rosa Luxembourg (1870-1919), Marxist revolutionary; Nikolai Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), leader of the 1917 Russian Communist revolution; and Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941), German Social Democrat, were all ideological socialists.
• 2Cf. Ayn Rand, <em>For the New Intellectual</em>, New York 1961, p. 4.
• 3See my <em>Human Action</em>, 3rd rev. ed. Chicago, 1966, pp. 608-610.

The market economy—capitalism—is based on private ownership of the material means of production and private entrepreneurship. The consumers, by their buying or abstention from buying, ultimately determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. They render profitable the affairs of those businessmen who best comply with their wishes and unprofitable the affairs of those who do not produce what they are asking for most urgently. Profits convey control of the factors of production into the hands of those who are employing them for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers, and losses withdraw them from the control of the inefficient businessmen. In a market economy not sabotaged by the government the owners of property are mandataries of the consumers as it were. On the market a daily repeated plebiscite determines who should own what and how much. It is the consumers who make some people rich and other people penniless.

Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulates riches.

In a society of the type that Adam Ferguson, Saint-Simon, and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) called militaristic and present-day Americans call feudal, private property of land was the fruit of violent usurpation or of donations on the part of the conquering warlord. Some people owned more, some less and some nothing because the chieftain had determined it that way. In such a society it was correct to assert that the abundance of the great landowners was the corollary of the indigence of the landless. But it is different in a market economy. Bigness in business does not impair, but improves the conditions of the rest of the people. The millionaires are acquiring their fortunes in supplying the many with articles that were previously beyond their reach. If laws had prevented them from getting rich, the average American household would have to forgo many of the gadgets and facilities that are today its normal equipment. This country enjoys the highest standard of living ever known in history because for several generations no attempts were made toward “equalization” and “redistribution.” Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well-being, not the cause of anybody’s distress. Where there is a “lower degree of inequality,” there is necessarily a lower standard of living of the masses.

Demand for “Distribution”

In the opinion of the demagogues inequality in what they call the “distribution” of wealth and incomes is in itself the worst of all evils. Justice would require an equal distribution. It is therefore both fair and expedient to confiscate the surplus of the rich or at least a considerable part of it and to give it to those who own less. This philosophy tacitly presupposes that such a policy will not impair the total quantity produced. But even if this were true, the amount added to the average man’s buying power would be much smaller than extravagant popular illusions assume. In fact the luxury of the rich absorbs only a slight fraction of the nation’s total consumption. The much greater part of the rich men’s incomes is not spent for consumption, but saved and invested. It is precisely this that accounts for the accumulation of their great fortunes. If the funds which the successful businessmen would have ploughed back into productive employments are used by the state for current expenditure or given to people who consume them, the further accumulation of capital is slowed down or entirely stopped. Then there is no longer any question of economic improvement, technological progress, and a trend toward higher average standards of living.

When Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto recommended “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and “abolition of all right of inheritance” as measures “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie,” they were consistent from the point of view of the ultimate end they were aiming at, viz., the substitution of socialism for the market economy. They were fully aware of the inevitable consequences of these policies. They openly declared that these measures are “economically untenable” and that they advocated them only because “they necessitate further inroads” upon the capitalist social order and are “unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production,” i.e., as a means of bringing about socialism.

But it is quite a different thing when these measures which Marx and Engels characterized as “economically untenable” are recommended by people who pretend that they want to preserve the market economy and economic freedom. These self-styled middle-of-the-road politicians are either hypocrites who want to bring about socialism by deceiving the people about their real intentions, or they are ignoramuses who do not know what they are talking about. For progressive taxes upon incomes and upon estates are incompatible with the preservation of the market economy.

The middle-of-the-road man argues this way: “There is no reason why a businessman should slacken in the best conduct of his affairs only because he knows that his profits will not enrich him but will benefit all people. Even if he is not an altruist who does not care for lucre and who unselfishly toils for the common weal, he will have no motive to prefer a less efficient performance of his activities to a more efficient. It is not true, that the only incentive that impels the great captains of industry is acquisitiveness. They are no less driven by the ambition to bring their products to perfection.”

Supremacy of the Consumers

This argumentation entirely misses the point. What matters is not the behavior of the entrepreneurs but the supremacy of the consumers. We may take it for granted that the businessmen will be eager to serve the consumers to the best of their abilities even if they themselves do not derive any advantage from their zeal and application. They will accomplish what according to their opinion best serves the consumers. But then it will no longer be the consumers that determine what they get. They will have to take what the businessmen believe is best for them. The entrepreneurs, not the consumers, will then be supreme. The consumers will no longer have the power to entrust control of production to those businessmen whose products they like most and to relegate those whose products they appreciate less to a more modest position in the system.

If the present American laws concerning the taxation of the profits of corporations, the incomes of individuals and inheritances had been introduced about sixty years ago, all those new products whose consumption has raised the standard of living of the “common man” would either not be produced at all or only in small quantities for the benefit of a minority. The Ford enterprises would not exist if Henry Ford’s profits had been taxed away as soon as they came into being. The business structure of 1895 would have been preserved. The accumulation of new capital would have ceased or at least slowed down considerably. The expansion of production would lag behind the increase of population. There is no need to expatiate about the effects of such a state of affairs.

Profit and loss tell the entrepreneur what the consumers are asking for most urgently. And only the profits the entrepreneur pockets enable him to adjust his activities to the demand of the consumers. If the profits are expropriated, he is prevented from complying with the directives given by the consumers. Then the market economy is deprived of its steering wheel. It becomes a senseless jumble.

People can consume only what has been produced. The great problem of our age is precisely this: Who should determine what is to be produced and consumed, the people or the State, the consumers themselves or a paternal government? If one decides in favor of the consumers, one chooses the market economy. If one decides in favor of the government, one chooses socialism. There is no third solution. The determination of the purpose for which each unit of the various factors of production is to be employed cannot be divided.

Demand for Equalization

The supremacy of the consumers consists in their power to hand over control of the material factors of production and thereby the conduct of production activities to those who serve them in the most efficient way. This implies inequality of wealth and incomes. If one wants to do away with inequality of wealth and incomes, one must abandon capitalism and adopt socialism. (The question whether any socialist system would really give income equality must be left to an analysis of socialism.)

But, say the middle-of-the-road enthusiasts, we do not want to abolish inequality altogether. We want merely to substitute a lower degree of inequality for a higher degree.

These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definite degree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of any arbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally. They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that a lower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which a smaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But if this is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavors toward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree of inequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessary to embark upon further measures toward equalization, is just a matter of personal judgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in the passing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and “redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they consider to be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest?the majority?of the people, they cannot oppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedly beneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always be people whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy. Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomes is an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low; equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth and incomes.

The history of the taxation of profits, incomes and estates in all countries clearly shows that once the principle of equalization is adopted, there is no point at which the further progress of the policy of equalization can be checked. If, at the time the Sixteenth Amendment was adopted, somebody had predicted that some years later the income tax progression would reach the height it has really attained in our day, the advocates of the Amendment would have called him a lunatic. It is certain that only a small minority in Congress will seriously oppose further sharpening of the progressive element in the tax rate scales if such a sharpening should be suggested by the Administration or by a congressman anxious to enhance his chances for re-election. For, under the sway of the doctrines taught by contemporary pseudo-economists, all but a few reasonable men believe that they are injured by the mere fact that their own income is smaller than that of other people and that it is not a bad policy to confiscate this difference.

There is no use in fooling ourselves. Our present taxation policy is headed toward a complete equalization of wealth and incomes and thereby toward socialism. This trend can be reversed only by the cognition of the role that profit and loss and the resulting inequality of wealth and incomes play in the operation of the market economy. People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenities whose enjoyment is called the “American way of life.”

Reprinted from Ideas on Liberty, May 1955.