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Global Capitalism: Curing Oppression and PovertyBy Andrew Bernstein
__._,_.___
Although leftist agitators continue to protest global
capitalism, they overlook the key points in the debate. Capitalism has been
instituted on three continents—in western Europe, North America, and Asia. These
nations—England, France, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and the others—are
among the world’s wealthiest countries with per capita incomes in the range of
at least $20,000– $30,000 annually. Additionally, even the prosperity of a
so-called “socialist” country like Sweden is based on significant elements of
capitalism, including Volvo, Saab, and Ericsson, as well as countless private
small shops.
But capitalism is not
merely the system of prosperity; fundamentally, it is the system of individual
rights and freedom. The inalienable rights of individuals are largely protected
in these countries. For example, their citizens enjoy freedom of speech, of the
press, and of intellectual _expression_. They have freedom of religion. Similarly,
they possess economic freedom, including the right to own property—their own
home or farm—to start their own businesses, and to seek profit. These countries
hold free elections, and their governments are subject to the rule of law.
By contrast, the
noncapitalist nations of the world, past and present, lack both freedom and
prosperity. For example, in feudal Europe, before the capitalist revolution of
the late eighteenth century, serfdom and its legacy dominated. Peasants were
often legally tied to the land and possessed few rights. Commoners, more
broadly, were subordinated to the king, aristocrats, and Church, and free
thought was punished. Voltaire, for example, was imprisoned for his
revolutionary ideas, as was Diderot. Galileo was threatened with torture and
Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for supporting scientific theories that
clashed with the teachings of the Church. The minds and rights of individual
citizens were thoroughly suppressed.
What were the practical
results of such repression? Poverty, famine, and disease were endemic during the
feudal era. The bubonic plague wiped out virtually one third of Europe’s
population during the fourteenth century, and recurred incessantly into the
eighteenth. Famine killed sizable portions of the population in Scotland,
Finland, and Ireland—and caused misery and death even in such relatively
prosperous countries as England and France. According to one economist, economic
growth was nonexistent during the centuries 500–1500—and per capita income rose
by merely 0.1 percent per year in the years 1500–1700. In 1500 the European per
capita GDP was roughly $215; in 1700, roughly $265.1
The world today is filled
with countries more brutally repressed even than those of feudal Europe. In
Sudan, for example, the Islamic government arms Arab militias that murder, rape,
and enslave the black Christian population. There are currently tens of
thousands of black slaves in Sudan. In Rwanda in 1994, Hutu tribesmen
slaughtered 800,000 innocent victims, mostly members of the Tutsi tribe. In
communist North Korea, political prisoners are enslaved, starved, and used for
target practice by prison guards and troops.2
The practical results of
such oppression are the same as in feudal Europe. In Sudan per capita GDP is
$296; in Rwanda it is $227. In North Korea, where nighttime satellite
photographs reveal utter darkness because the country lacks electricity,
conditions are just as grim. Despite massive aid from the capitalist West, tens
of thousands of human beings starved to death there in recent years.3
What must be recognized is
that freedom is a necessary condition of wealth. Cures for disease, economic
growth, agricultural and industrial revolutions—the means by which human beings
rise above deprivation and misery—are products of the rational mind operating
under conditions of political-economic freedom. When a James Watt, an Edward
Jenner, a Cyrus McCormick, an Alexander Graham Bell, or a Thomas Edison exists
under an oppressive regime, whether feudal, communist, fascist or theocratic,
his intelligence and revolutionary thinking make him a threat and he is
suppressed. But when such a genius lives under capitalism, he is free to create
a perfected steam engine, a treatment for smallpox, a reaper, a telephone, and
an electric lighting system, respectively.
Liberation from Bondage The freedom of the
capitalist system liberates creative human brainpower from bondage to the state.
The ensuing advances in science, medicine, agriculture, technology, and industry
generate vast increases in living standards and life expectancies. It is not
surprising that during the capitalist epoch, roughly 1820 to the present, the
free countries of western Europe and North America saw their total economic
output increase 60 times, and per capita income grow to be 13 times what it had
been previously.4
Even minimal capitalist
elements have already produced salutary results in communist Vietnam. The annual
minimum wage there is $134; but Nike, which owns Vietnamese
factories—misleadingly dubbed “sweatshops” by anti-capitalist ideologues—pays an
average salary of $670, which is double the country’s per capita
GDP.5 Western
companies in the poorest countries pay their workers, on average, twice what the
corresponding native firms pay. Most important, workers voluntarily seek such employment, and
unlike the repressive governments, these private companies have no legal right
to initiate force against them.
Capitalism is freedom—and
freedom leads to prosperity. The moral is the practical. On the other hand,
statism is oppression—and oppression leads to destitution. The immoral is the
impractical. After two centuries of capitalism, 80 years of socialism, and a
millennium of feudalism, the contest is over and the scores are on the board.
The alternatives open to human beings are stark: freedom and prosperity or
statism and misery. We have only to make our choice.
1. Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 4–7. 2. Stéphane Courtois et al.,
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes,
Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.
547–64; Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black
Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2001), pp. 199–223; Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 2001.
See also www.iabolish.com/.
3. Gerald O’Driscoll et al.,
The 2001 Index of Economic Freedom
(Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal, 2001), pp. 229–30,
317–18, 341–42. See also Courtois.
4. Maddison. Also see his
essay “Poor Until 1820,” Wall Street
Journal, January 11, 1999.
5. Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitatlism
(Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2003), p. 219.
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