Capitalism

I read this morning that a massive war in the eastern Mediteranean around 1200 B.C. may have ended several empires. My thought is that if it involves mutually destructive reckless behavior, it probably happened. That sort of thing is more or less what CONSTITUTES history.

Here is what popped in my head: Capitalism, so called, is the best system ever devised by the mind of man for directing aggressive energies in creative, productive, and PEACEFUL directions. Can and should we criticize the IMF for allowing the figurative rape of nations? Yes. It was created by Communists and does little but help keep the fiction alive that our banking system is just and acceptable, when it is plainly neither.

But the historical alternative is not peace and justice. Capitalism, so called, is not an historically aberrant intrusion into an unbroken history of peaceful and cooperative coexistence.  It is s vastly less bad alternative to breaking down people’s doors and taking what they have built by force. On the one side of it we have conquest and rapine as universal facts. On the other, we have Socialism as a state sponsored version of the same theft and rapine. It simply adds hypocrisy and self deception to the list of crimes.

I would quibble with many things Ayn Rand said, but her defense of Capitalism as a uniquely advantageous form of peaceful and productive coexistence, without the diminution of life energy, is right on the money.