Atheist Capitalism

A Fool's Party

“homines natura libertati studere et condicionem servitutis odisse”
– Julius Caesar

As stated earlier, aesthetic ideals that exist outside of man are inhumane because in evaluation they sacrifice man. But how was the philosophy of radical individualism perverted to serve the socialist ideal? How was it that existential philosophy and atheistic thought followed into utopian and socialist idealism? How did the radical individualist belief that man is alive and free become a philosophy wherein he is neither?

As a member of the social machine a radical individualist is a puffed up person who can fancy himself as master of his fellow men, since the State is master of all men. The greater the ego of the individual, the mightier the power of the State, and there is much ego in the maxims of socialism. Maxims such as; “man does not live by bread alone”, when bread is his livelihood.

For a value to be regarded as the highest value it must either be universal or singular. Putting life and living as the highest value singularly is elitism and cowardice. The most singular form of elitism being, “my life has more value than anybody else’s”, also known as a sense of entitlement. If life is the highest value universally then we come to the conclusion that, “all life is infinitely valuable, since my life is infinitely valuable to me”. The misconception in both cases is that the radical individualist holds simply being alive as the highest value, and now we start to unravel the origins of socialist and utopian idealism. Let’s explore further.

Freedom to act, next to being alive, is the other concept that radical individualists regard as sacrosanct. If this is your highest ideal, then socialism can appeal to you by claiming that economic inequality is equal to slavery. As has been noted by many thinkers, wealth gives a person freedom of action that poverty can not afford. A poor man can not do such and such but a rich man can. In a sense the rich man is freer than the poor man. Freedom is purchased through effort which produces wealth. Marx viewed the purchase of labor for production as extortion of labor. This view believes that the investor gets rich from the labor of the worker, and so is free while the worker is enslaved. The industrialist is seen as a slave master instead of someone who offers others the economic opportunity to make themselves free. True extortion of labor can only occur when someone is forced to produce with no chance of escape. A situation of dire poverty can limit a person’s choices to where they are forced to work, but there can be no escape from that work only under two conditions, when the worker has no place to invest his earnings or when the worker makes a wage just sufficient to support himself. This second condition is the one that Marx attacked. He believed that the industrialist will take as much as possible from the worker leaving only what is necessary for him to sustain himself. This is true. Mobility of labor, however, prevents this as the industrialist can get better more productive labor by paying more for it. Economic inequality can only limit the freedom to act when there is some force to prevent investment opportunity or mobility of labor. One such force is government regulation, the bread and butter of the socialist.

So to the atheist and radical individualist who would be easily swayed, utopian and socialist idealism sells itself as equality but it seeks to accomplish this by treating people differently, it claims to set the people free but creates the economic conditions which keep them bound, and it claims to respect life but abolishes the worth and value of it. This would surely be a sick joke, if it were not the farcical fate of many atheists who simply abandoned one religion for another.

posted by C. Smith @ 2:40 PM

Everything is Under Control: economic stagnation and individual freedom

Economic progress, the source of television, automobiles, wage labor, and cheap consumable goods, according to the Austrian capitalist philosopher and economist Ludwig von Mises, comes from three forces.

• Entrepreneurs, who employ capital which has been accumulated by investors to satisfy a want or need of the masses.
• Investors, who loan their capital with the expectation of a return in excess of the original loan (the demand that their capital be productive). And,
• Technologists, who attempt to perfect methods of production, thus making it cheaper and more efficient.

Thus, economic progress can only be hindered by,

• The amount of capital available for allocation, and
• Regulations on the ability to move capital freely.

Markets determine the first condition, and governments determine the second. (For the sake of accuracy let’s note that governments can borrow to increase the amount of available capital temporarily, but other than this, all governments can do is regulate and restrict.) The only way that governments can promote economic progress is by deregulation of policies it never should have created in the first place, or offsetting regulation in one area with regulations and taxation in another.

History teaches that in the absence of forced resistance governments when not maximizing power are maintaining it, but never relinquishing it. So, there is a tendency to increase the power of the State over time.

Any increase in technology that makes business more efficient can also be used to make government more efficient so the natural course of economic progress makes the government better at its job, which is wielding power over the individual, the subjugation of the individual to the collective. This increase in the effectiveness of government allows a smaller and smaller group of people to rule over the body politic. This can be considered The Law of Efficiency of Control. Totalitarianism is inevitable.

Or so it would seem, but as government increases its power over the individual it also restricts the free movement of capital and screws up economic progress. Is this a big enough obstacle to prevent totalitarianism?

If this imposition of government control could be supported by the advances already achieved, or advances that can be stolen from other freer governments, then the fact that it screws up economic progress could be mitigated by the ability to maintain the progress achieved. To Hell with the individual, the government can exist without him, and after the fall of capitalism a modern global form of medieval feudalism may be the norm. The individual will exist as a serf within a structure of baronies, tied to whatever fixed capital exists (land factories, mills, etc.) and bought and sold with it, the whole of his endeavor will be subsistence from day to day.

Rand believed that mans mind does not work at the barrel of a gun, essentially that you can not force people to think and create, but there is no need for continual creation. There is no assurance that the individual is the final consideration, or that reason needs to prevail for humans to survive. Indeed, they can survive within irrational traditions, and an economic system simply built around maintenance, for a long time.

Freedom for the individual is inexorably tied to the ability to move capital freely, as they wish, and without hindrance from the government. This is because without economic progress individual freedom can only be achieved by anarchy. Man is either free from government or free within government. There are no other options for the individual.

posted by C. Smith @ 1:15 PM