Defend capitalism

Gerry Nicholls wrote an excellent article encouraging entrepreneurs to defend the free market.

Entrepreneurs must stop apologizing -- Report Magazine

In Ayn Rand’s famous philosophic novel, Atlas Shrugged, leading entrepreneurs and businessmen go “on strike” as a way of protesting socialism.

Eventually this strike causes the economy to collapse which in turns causes politicians to finally understand the true value of those who actually create wealth and prosperity.

It’s a good story, but alas it’s only fiction.

In real life, the majority of politicians, and for that matter most of the general public, have virtually no understanding as to how capitalists and entrepreneurs, when allowed to operate in a free market, benefit society.

In fact, if anything an anti-entrepreneur bias permeates our culture. Or least it permeates our popular culture. Just consider, for instance, how in movies and TV shows, successful business people are inevitably portrayed as “greedy” or “corrupt” or “heartless.”

Indeed, these days the prejudice against the free market and those who make it work, has reached a near hysteric level, as pundits, politicians and others seek to pin blame for the current economic slowdown on what they like to call “corporate greed”.

What these critics don’t understand, of course, is that the same free market system they like to rail against is also the same system which has made our society the most prosperous in history.

And besides being the most efficient way to create wealth, the free market system also happens to be morally superior to it main economic alternative -- socialism.

Free markets are based on choice; socialism on compulsion.

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