Saturday, January 02, 2010

You Are A Capitalist If You have Something to Buy or Sell

It's funny, strange and hypocritical for those human beings that rail and rant against business and then turn around and live their lives filled with things that went from the mind of a thinker to the factory of a producer, to the retail store of merchant, to the home of an owner who bought the product. Business has been the business of human beings since the emergence of thinking man. We are all businessmen in a sense...we all have something to sell (or buy). We are all capitalists whether you like it or not. And why should we not love capitalism? We all have something to sell or something to buy.

The anti-business mindset . . . is worthy of a pampered adolescent who is searching for a cause with which to display his unique moral sensibility. It is not worthy of an adult who should be able to use his imagination, if not actual experience, to appreciate the extraordinary human effort that has gone into creating the delightful tools that we daily take for granted. On my desk sit various humble objects—a tiny clock, a stapler, a paper clip box, a Lucite cook book stand for holding up drafts and other papers while I type. Each object represents a fractal geometry of complexity, composed as it is of parts that themselves require enterprise to manufacture, assemble, and deliver, all born along on waves of energy and infrastructure to which yet another set of entrepreneurs contributed. The fact that all of those distributors and manufacturers tried to make a profit does not detract from the fact that they offered goods which enhance our lives. . . .

It is the ingratitude that kills me the most among anti-business types. The materials that furnish a single room in an American home required daring, perseverance, and organizational skill from millions of individuals over generations. I hope they all got filthy rich.
READ "The Anticapitalist Mentality" by Heather MacDonald at WSJ.

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