Free-market capitalism has a bad reputation. The easy promises of socialism are an obvious part of the problem, able as it is to paint the individualism of the free market as heartless compared to the collectivisation of problems proposed by the socialist model. But another challenge for those who promote free markets is the catalogue of bad events, past as well as present, that are being ascribed to capitalism.
For starters, many evils long confined to the annals of history are being conflated with capitalism, the primary one probably being slavery – and it’s not hard to see why: when human beings are being bought and sold, well, that’s capitalism, isn’t it? Well, in fact, it very much isn’t. The basic tenet of capitalism is in the ownership of the means of production being held by private individuals or organizations, as opposed to socialism where the means of production are owned collectively (in practice by the state). But capitalism doesn’t condone the trade of other people: slavery’s violation of people’s basic self-ownership is a crime, and selling the loot of crime is not capitalism, it’s just a crime.
Fast forward to today and no greater propaganda tool exists for the left than to blame the twin evils of climate change and interventionist foreign policy on capitalism. We deal with the environmentalism movement here, so let’s focus instead on the way the anti-war movement is using the advocacy for peaceful foreign relations to fight capitalism at home.
Much as is the case with slavery, it’s not hard to see why it is easy pickings for the left to paint the interventionist foreign policy of western countries as an extension of capitalism. When US and British troops invade foreign shores and drop bombs on far-away lands, they always do so in countries where there are geopolitical aims that stretch far beyond the stated objective of removing some evil regime. And when they are really there for the oil, then they are there for the money; and when they’re in it for the money, they are serving the corporations, not the people. See: it’s capitalism again!
Interventionist foreign policy is seen to serve the interest of corporations and “capital”, just like colonialism before it, because the beneficiaries of both have always been the corporations, never the people. This is how capitalism gets tainted by atrocities perpetrated by the state. The left has a word for it, “state capitalism,” which is how they describe the symbiosis of corporations and government. But what they actually mean is corporatism: when the state is controlled by vested interest: by organisations and corporations that use their political clout to influence the actions of the state. It isn’t capitalism, because it isn’t free markets. The state, with its monopoly on coercive violence, is the very opposite of free markets. But what we see as black and white, they see as shades of grey: sure, it may not be pure, free market capitalism, but it is still private business using its power to hurt the little man, so that’s still some sort of capitalism, isn’t it? And where we see the solution as less government, they see it as less private business.
“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will,” said the great Frédéric Bastiat. This is an important truth. When our prosperity is interlinked, we cannot afford war. What has brought peace to the modern west is not international treaties or supranational organisations, but free trade. Capitalism is the guarantor of peace, not the bringer of war. But shamefully, the left is often successful in painting the opposite picture.
Interventionist foreign policy is damaging not only to the rights of the people whose countries are the target of military action. It also undermines the prospects of free markets being accepted as benign, because it is so easy to make the mistake of seeing interventionism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin. When private businesses do bad things, we should call them out, but we should never allow the left to conflate myriads of negative events, both historical and current, with free market capitalism.