Why Anti-Capitalism?

October 15, 1956

The supreme paradox of the present age is this. Capitalism—particularly in America, where it has reached its highest development—has brought to mankind the greatest liberty, the greatest security against violence, despotism, and expropriation, the greatest abundance, that it has ever known. To the common man it has brought the benefits of mass production and mass consumption, and amenities that, a century ago, were not even within the reach of kings. Yet this very capitalism is in our age daily denounced by the ruling clique in at least half the nations of the globe. More than half the world’s population has been taught to regard capitalism as the worst of all social evils. And within the “capitalistic” countries themselves, most of the “intellectuals” look upon a genuinely free capitalism with distrust. They never tire of satirizing and ridiculing either the system itself or the businessmen who are most successful under it. They advocate “reforms” ranging from more government intervention or “planning” at one end to outright Socialism or Communism at the other.

THE PARADOX

Why? Why, at the very moment when capitalism has brought the greatest material and scientific progress known to history should it be meeting with its greatest disparagement and opposition? This is the question Prof. Ludwig von Mises has set himself to answer in a short book called The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (Van Nostrand, $3.75).

His answer is that the opposition to capitalism finds its main source in the very benefits of capitalism. In a society based on caste and status, the individual could ascribe his adverse fate to conditions beyond his own control. He had no reason to be ashamed of a humble rank, because conditions made it impossible to rise above the class in which he was born. But under capitalism a man’s station in life depends largely upon his own qualities, enterprise, and actions or upon his own defects, errors, and failures. “The much talked about sternness of capitalism consists in the fact that it handles everybody according to his contribution to the well-being of his fellow men. The sway of the principle, to each according to his accomplishments, does not allow of any excuse for personal shortcomings.” And as nearly everybody can find someone who—with no better start—has succeeded better than himself, large numbers of us are tempted to blame the result on “the system,” and to imagine that we would have been or could still be much better off under some other system, such as Socialism.

ROLE OF ENVY

Mises applies this central thesis to the common man, to many white-collar workers, professors, scientists, novelists, journalists, playwrights, actors, and other “intellectuals.” Because his book is so uncompromising, it is bound to arouse strong dissent. Many readers will question whether the envy and frustration that Mises describes constitute a sufficient explanation of today’s anti-capitalist mentality. Others will declare that he overstates the role played by these motives as compared with sheer well-meaning confusion. Still others will contend that many of his statements are too sweeping and unqualified.

But Mises is much too good a logician not to recognize that the arguments against capitalism cannot be answered merely by an ad hominem retort that they spring from discreditable motives. In his great works, Human Action and Socialism, he has spelled out in full the real arguments for capitalism and against Socialism. And he restates them here in summary form:

“The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses. The result is a tendency towards a continuous improvement in the average standard of living, a progressing enrichment of the many. . . . On the market of a capitalistic society the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. . . . The profit system makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way.”