Rand, Ayn – Capitalism

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

It must be remembered that the political systems of the nineteenth century were not pure capitalism, but mixed economies. The element of freedom, however, was dominant; it was as close to a century of capitalism as mankind has come. But the element of statism kept growing throughout the nineteenth century, and by the time it blasted the world in 1914, the governments involved were dominated by statist policies.

Just as, in domestic affairs, all the evils caused by statism

and government controls were blamed on capitalism and the free market—so, in foreign affairs, all the evils of statist policies were blamed on and ascribed to capitalism. Such myths as “capitalistic imperialism,” “war-profiteering,” or the notion that capitalism has to win “markets” by military conquest are examples of the superficiality or the unscrupulous-ness of statist commentators and historians.

The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade— i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.

As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire because it opened world channels of energy for commerce in general. Though repressive (status) government was still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with very bad results, on the whole England’s invisible exports were law and free trade. Practically speaking, while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.2

As in the case of Rome, when the repressive element of England’s mixed economy grew to become her dominant policy and turned her to statism, her empire fell apart It was not military force that had held it together.

Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force. The same type of businessmen who sought special advantages by government action in their own countries, sought special markets by government action abroad. At whose expense? At the expense of the overwhelming majority of businessmen who paid the taxes for such ventures, but gained nothing. Who justified such policies and sold them to the public? The statist intellectuals who manufao

• Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964, p. 121. Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1943.

tured such doctrines as “the public interest” or “national prestige” or “manifest destiny.”

The actual war profiteers of all mixed economies were and are of that type: men with political pull who acquire fortunes by government favor, during or after a war—fortunes which they could not have acquired on a free market.

Remember that private citizens—whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers—have no power to start a war. That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government. Which type of government is more likely to plunge a country into war: a government of limited powers, bound by constitutional restrictions—or an unlimited government, open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests or ideologies, a government able to command armies to march at the whim of a single chief executive?

Yet it is not a limited government that today’s peace-lovers are advocating.

(Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service—which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.)

So long as a country is even semi-free, its mixed-economy profiteers are not the source of its warlike influences or policies, and are not the primary cause of its involvement in war. They are merely political scavengers cashing-in on a public trend. The primary cause of that trend is the mixed-economy intellectuals.

Observe the link between statism and militarism in the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just as the destruction of capitalism and the rise of the totalitarian state were not caused by business or labor or any economic interests, but by the dominant statist ideology of the intellectuals—so the resurgence of the doctrines of military conquest and armed crusades for political “ideals” were the product of the same intellectuals’ belief that “the good” is to be achieved by force.

The rise of a spirit of nationalistic imperialism in the

United States did not come from the right, but from the left, not from big-business interests, but from the collectivist reformers who influenced the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. For a history of these influences, see The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur A. Ekiroh, Js

In such instances [writes Professor Ekirch] as title progressives’ increasing acceptance of compulsory military training and of the white man’s burden, there were obvious reminders of the paternalism of much of their economic reform legislation. Imperialism, according to a recent student of American foreign policy, was a revolt against many of the values of traditional liberalism. “The spirit of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest; the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect.”4

In regard to Woodrow Wilson, Professor Ekirch writes:

Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of United States foreign trade to come about as a result of free international competition, but he found it easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize direct American intervention as a means of safeguarding the national interest.11

And: “He [Wilson] seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions—which he conceived as liberal and democratic—to the more benighted areas of the world.”6 It was not the advocates of capitalism who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade—it was the “liberal” magazine The New Republic. Its editor, Herbert Croly, used such arguments as: “The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”

Just as Wilson, a “liberal” reformer, led the United States into World War I, “to make the world safe for democracy”— so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another “liberal” reformer, led it into World War II, in the name of the “Four Freedoms.” In

* New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955.

♦JA/d, p. 189. The quotation on “the spirit of imperialism” comes from R. E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 47.

•/AM, p. 199.

“Ibid.

both cases, the “conservatives”—and the big-business interests^—were overwhelmingly opposed to war but were silenced. In the case of World War II, they were smeared as “isolationists,” “reactionaries,” and “America-First’ers.”

World War I led, not to “democracy,” but to the creation of three dictatorships: Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany. World War II led, not to “Four Freedoms,” but to the surrender of one-third of the world’s population into communist slavery.

If peace were the goal of today’s intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude—and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale—would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that “poverty breeds wars” (and justifying war by sympathizing with a “material greed” of that kind). But the question is: what breeds poverty? If you look at the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country’s freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Observe that the “haves” are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the “have-nots” have not.

If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

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