This article originally appeared at WALReader.com, the website of our magazine.
Let’s not mince words here: America, as well as every country on earth, is far closer to being socialist than capitalist. It’s not particularly close. The real question capitalists should ask themselves is how it got to be this way. And the answer does not lie with the tenacity of the socialists, but the anger from themselves.
The evidence of government-run socialism’s harm to the masses is self-evident and requires only an elementary knowledge of history or economics. So why, then, are they so successful, even while their advances slowly create a larger a larger wedge between rich and poor, the vary thing they claim to hate. But the question is already answered by the sentence. They claim to hate the disparity and it’s a message that resonates well for those who struggle with finances. And, if we’re permitted honesty, almost everyone struggles with finances in at least one aspect of their lives.
It’s not capitalism that must change. It’s the salesmen. Capitalism has done it’s job and done it well, taking peasants, casting out their burlap and replacing it with silk, taking homeless, putting roofs over their heads, and taking the destitute, giving them access to luxuries from all over the globe.
Yet capitalists waste so much time on fights that only further galvanize the socialist cause. Instead of going appealing to the huddled masses that benefit the most from ending the Federal Reserve, ending perpetual war, and ending false scarcities that drive up the costs of food and housing, they appeal to the elite, defending monstrous tax breaks. Or, even worse, they look at the budget and start not by axing the subsidies that go to the ultra-wealthy, but the subsidies that go to single mothers and starving kids.
The message does not need to be watered down or sound any less radical than it is. I mean… Ending the Fed and all wars is not exactly a small request. This is not a call to increase or even retain entitlement spending. It’s a call to show not just the poorest among us, but the average person, how ending these entitlements helps humanity. Capitalism is not just letting the rich be rich, it’s a death sentence to segregation, racism, religious warfare, homophobia, pollution, and all manners of societal issues.
If you aren’t a compassionate capitalist, you’re not just a poor messenger; you’re not a capitalist at all. You don’t understand the philosophy. And you’re only assisting in the slow encroachment of authoritarianism that is poisoning every last one of us.
