David L. Kendall - Morality and Capitalism: A Dialogue on Freedom

Most people want to be good people, and most people are. In How to Win Friends and Influence People , Dale Carnegie recounted stories of how even Americas most notorious criminals, men like Al Capone and Two Gun Crowley, didnt see themselves as bad people . Even Hitler did not see himself as a bad guy. People want to be good, and they want to be thought to be good by others. For that reason, morality matters to people, because we cannot be good people if we are not first moral people.

This book is not about how capitalism works to advance human prosperity, which it surely does. This book is about the moral foundations of capitalism. Tens, if not hundreds, of excellent books have explained how capitalism works. The writings of Adam Smith , Frederic Bastiat , Ludwig von Mises , Ayn Rand , Milton Friedman , Friedrich Hayek, Israel Kirzner , George Reisman , and Murray Rothbard are but a few exceptional examples. A complete list of authors who have explained more than ably how capitalism generates human prosperity would run to tens of pages.

History shows unequivocally that capitalism works to generate widespread prosperity for humans. That conclusion is no longer much debated. 11,12 Capitalism definitely works. Yet, for all its success in generating human prosperity, capitalism is reviled by hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Googling the phrase capitalism images, yields anecdotal evidence of how reviled capitalism is. The search produces a panoply of images that convey negative, evil, or diabolical meanings for capitalism, with scarcely a positive, good, or inspiring image to be found. Why? Why is capitalism so denigrated?

Faced with undeniable historical evidence that capitalism generates unmatched prosperity for humans, its opponents have retrenched. Now the critics of capitalism claim that it is unjust, un-green, and immoralnever mind that it works. The mantras of social justice, save the planet and were all in this together have replaced the soundly debunked Marxist claim that socialism would inevitably be the bright future of humans. If you like capitalism, say its critics, shame on you. Now, the enemies of capitalism exhort us to support a democratic socialist agendabecause democratic socialism is just, green, and egalitarian, say the critics of capitalism.

Is capitalism unjust? Are contemporary opponents of capitalism right, claiming as they do that capitalism is immoral? That is the question this book explores. Because people want to be moral, the undeniable historical evidence that capitalism generates widespread prosperity is simply insufficient to silence the critics. For indeed, if capitalism is immoral , it should be rejected.