> Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
A lot of the rhetoric in the past went the other way: freedom is good because capitalism requires it.
As a former and still sometimes libertarian who once read a lot of Ayn Rand and still thinks she made some good points, I personally get a big case of the "flying saucers didn't come blues" from this.
Freedom and free enterprise were supposed to go together. Then Singapore and China proved that you don't need freedom for capitalism and that it might even be a liability.
Markets love a kind of pragmatic totalitarianism that acts proactively to restrain any genuine "disruption" and much more importantly to prevent panic selling and crashes. Investors can feel confident in the market if there's a totalitarian backstop in place that will spring into action to prevent a market panic. Markets work great if they're just not allowed to go down.
Controlled societies are great for capitalism. Real freedom means the freedom to do things that do not increase GDP and behave in ways that disrupt or distract from corporate culture. Turn the world into an office park. We can see this mentality spreading to the West.
The lower classes can safely be ignored, drugged/entertained, or distracted by pitting different races and cultural identities against each other.
If the upper classes (upper middle class, technicians, academics, the "lower rich") get politically uppity or have moral reservations you can just flatter their sense of superiority and entitlement. Make them think they've been brought into the fold. Invite them to rub shoulders with the real elite. Give them a false sense of freedom through consumer choice and BoBo pop libertine indulgence. Take the hedonism pioneered by the counterculture and strip it of its rebellious and spiritual undercurrents. Tinder is a great example: a meat market night club without the music, dancing, or art. Create pseudo-free gated enclaves where the upper middle classes and the rich can enjoy custom tailored lifestyles optimized for the consumption of high-end goods and the production of intellectual capital that ultimately benefits the real aristocracy.
Edit:
To all the leftists and anarchists right now who are wagging their fingers at us libertarians saying "we told you so," please hold back a little on the schadenfreude. This future is absolutely not what we had in mind.
Edit #2:
In all seriousness though... independent of whether or not capitalism or markets are good things I think it's important to advocate freedom in and of itself as an independent moral, ethical, and political goal. Freedom is not good because it makes this or that work better. Freedom is good because human beings must be treated with dignity and deserve personal autonomy.
Way back in 1957, the National Review took on Ayn Rand's book. The main gist of their overall critical review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-y...) is that a "dictatorship of the technocrats" that they saw the book advocating in the end probably does not look that much different than a dictatorship from the left side of the political spectrum or other similar ilk. From my viewpoint, in the end, some Large Figure ends up ruling, power corrupts, and the result is largely the same -- if any philosophy is so absolutist that disagreement is more than just disagreement, it is a Sin, this tends to be the net result.
There are positive points to be taken from many political philosophies (including libertarians and communists alike), my personal outlook is to never attach too dogmatically to one side though. :)
Capitalism and basic freedoms are indeed separate entities, but I do think it remains an open question whether China can become a knowledge / innovation powerhouse, while at the same time heading backwards on basic freedoms as they seem to be now. This is more the key that I see has been historically linked together. Controlled societies may be just fine for the nuts and bolts portion of capitalism, but one can point to countless examples in history where suppressed / tightly controlled knowledge ended up holding societies back, severely suppressing innovation.
I never read Rand as advocating a dictatorship of anyone. Of course you could argue that this is naive and that power vacuums invite someone to seize power.
I sometimes compare Rand to Marx. Both were very astute critics -- Marx of capitalism and Rand of socialism/communism. Unfortunately neither had practical ideas of what to do about it. Both advocated some version of "put certain ideas into practice and then (magic happens here) and then the evil state withers away." The magic is what doesn't happen. We're now able to see that the real world endpoint of communism is mafia rule and that the real world endpoint of capitalism is techno-feudalism.
Yeah, to clarify, the review is more implying naivety than straightforward advocacy. As in, the review believes Rand is "calling for an aristocracy of talents". But in the real modern world, this is a naive viewpoint, and "the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship."
The naivete ultimately comes from the failure to define "talent." The talent that yields advancement (in nearly any large scale society, not just capitalism) is often deception and primate dominance gestures. An aristocracy of talents becomes an aristocracy of narcissists and sociopaths.
Rand's heroes all look like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. People like that are notable because they are rare. Most of the ultra-wealthy more closely resemble Rand's villains.
Real creators are too busy creating to play the kind of dominance games that most often lead to political and business success. You can succeed by creating, but doing so is many orders of magnitude harder than succeeding through manipulation and so you get a smaller pool of people who can pull it off.
A lot of the rhetoric in the past went the other way: freedom is good because capitalism requires it.
As a former and still sometimes libertarian who once read a lot of Ayn Rand and still thinks she made some good points, I personally get a big case of the "flying saucers didn't come blues" from this.
Freedom and free enterprise were supposed to go together. Then Singapore and China proved that you don't need freedom for capitalism and that it might even be a liability.
Markets love a kind of pragmatic totalitarianism that acts proactively to restrain any genuine "disruption" and much more importantly to prevent panic selling and crashes. Investors can feel confident in the market if there's a totalitarian backstop in place that will spring into action to prevent a market panic. Markets work great if they're just not allowed to go down.
Controlled societies are great for capitalism. Real freedom means the freedom to do things that do not increase GDP and behave in ways that disrupt or distract from corporate culture. Turn the world into an office park. We can see this mentality spreading to the West.
The lower classes can safely be ignored, drugged/entertained, or distracted by pitting different races and cultural identities against each other.
If the upper classes (upper middle class, technicians, academics, the "lower rich") get politically uppity or have moral reservations you can just flatter their sense of superiority and entitlement. Make them think they've been brought into the fold. Invite them to rub shoulders with the real elite. Give them a false sense of freedom through consumer choice and BoBo pop libertine indulgence. Take the hedonism pioneered by the counterculture and strip it of its rebellious and spiritual undercurrents. Tinder is a great example: a meat market night club without the music, dancing, or art. Create pseudo-free gated enclaves where the upper middle classes and the rich can enjoy custom tailored lifestyles optimized for the consumption of high-end goods and the production of intellectual capital that ultimately benefits the real aristocracy.
Edit:
To all the leftists and anarchists right now who are wagging their fingers at us libertarians saying "we told you so," please hold back a little on the schadenfreude. This future is absolutely not what we had in mind.
Edit #2:
In all seriousness though... independent of whether or not capitalism or markets are good things I think it's important to advocate freedom in and of itself as an independent moral, ethical, and political goal. Freedom is not good because it makes this or that work better. Freedom is good because human beings must be treated with dignity and deserve personal autonomy.
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