I can’t say I was shocked when polling earlier this year found that young Americans preferred socialism to capitalism. Now, Democratic presidential candidates are capitalizing on this ever-growing voting block by supporting socialist policies such as a government takeover of healthcare, the abolition of private health insurance, and tuition-free college.
It’d be easy to blame this shift in support for socialism on political ignorance or media bias, but let’s not forget the responsibility that the libertarian and conservative Right hold in this fight. We are the ones who recognize that liberty, freedom, and capitalism are fragile values that must constantly be fought for, because they can be lost in a generation. Yet the results indicate that we are not fighting for these values in the right way.
Capitalists have made the same arguments for years. When the eccentric socialist in your macroeconomics class begins to tout the beauty of collectivism, our extinct is the same — pull out one of the graphs showing a rapid decline in global poverty due to capitalism, launch into an explanation of supply and demand, or describe the historical failures of socialism and communism.
And, against all intuitive thinking, this doesn’t work. Instead, the response is often a direct attack on your character. Our talking points are less and less compelling to young Americans. Meanwhile, socialists are gaining ground by pulling at the heartstrings, with impassioned pleas about the “right” to healthcare and the stark problem posed by inequality.
So, if the people want moral arguments, we must adapt and make the moral case for capitalism.
At a fundamental level, capitalism brings the best out of human nature. Famed socialist philosopher Karl Marx suggests that human nature is not fixed or permanent, but rather what guides human behavior is “species-being.” He argues that human nature, or species-being, is determined by social relations and the society an individual lives in.
This theory doesn’t stand the test of time.
Human nature doesn’t change, and moral truths are eternal. We still see ourselves in those who lived thousands of years ago, even though the society they lived in was fiercely different from our own. And it’s always been true that humans are largely motivated by self-interest.
Yet self-interest itself is not inherently immoral, it is just reality. The actions that self-interest may lead to, however, certainly can be immoral. If this is our nature, then the best way to curtail our worst tendencies is to live under a system that channels our selfish nature into something mutually beneficial. And that’s exactly what capitalism does.
With the introduction and rise of capitalism, trading with those different from you, rather than theft, became consistent with self-interest. Creating life-saving innovations for the public was in suppliers’ self-interest, as that’s how they made a profit. Driving down the prices of products that were never accessible to most people made sellers more money, not less.
Suddenly, self-interest meant less bigotry, less violence, Earth-shattering innovation, higher quality living, and a radical decline in global poverty.
In Capitalism and Commerce, professor Edward Younkins writes:
After all, one can only be a moral agent if he bears the responsibility of his moral actions.
At its core, capitalism is individualism, a philosophy that recognizes the inherent worth and ability in each and every person. Capitalism respects the choices of each person so long as he or she is not impeding on someone else’s freedom. In most cases, to use government force to interfere with this process is to say that the individual is not intelligent or capable enough to make good choices on his own.
Unfortunately, the same unwarranted elitism that stifled growth and innovation in the past threatens to do so again with the growing disdain for free market capitalism. And this is disastrous, because capitalism is the moral system. We just need to start talking about it as such.
Isabelle Morales is the president of the American University chapter of Young Americans for Liberty.
