I have observed already that one of the most common defenses of capitalism, a fake defense, I should say, is pitching capitalist “inequality” against the “equality” of egalitarianism, passed off as socialism. This defense likes to appeal to great authorities of the past, and one of such authorities is Aristotle.
Through Keynes’s “Aristotelity” (this is my Hobbesian inspeak) that “nothing is more unjust than to treat unequals equally,” we get to Aristotle’s directly relevant sentence in Politics: “Justice is equality, but only for equals; and justice is inequality, but only for those who are unequal.”
Indeed, Aristotle mentions two types of equality: numerical and proportional, the first being egalitarian, the second being reasonably conditioned by the inequality of the original input, and opts for the second type, as Keynes would do, in the first quote above.
But this kind of preference, on the part of Aristotle and Keynes, says nothing about the comparative merits of capitalism and socialism, as socialism does not encourage numerical equality, but unquestionably takes the proportional measure. As was written in the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor.” (Chapter I, Article 12.) Where is egalitarianism here?
It is thus ridiculous to represent Aristotle’s rejection of egalitarianism as his philosophical denunciation of socialism and embrace of capitalism, as capitalist apologists, such as, for instance, Isaac M. Morehouse, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, would want us to believe. Here is a typical argument on that account, which comes to us courtesy of the aforementioned Mr. Morehouse (from his article Aristotle on Mixed Economies, in the Mises Daily publication of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, June 26, 2008. Ironically, this “Austrian-sounding” libertarian-capitalist institution was founded in 1982 in the American State of Alabama. I will have much more to say about von Mises, and separately about American libertarian capitalism [as opposed to libertarian socialism] later on in this section.)---
“As Aristotle put it:
'But not every action, nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g., spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and such like things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excess or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong.'
The midpoint between murder and nonmurder is not a good choice: nonmurder is. However, the moderation between not caring a lick about the actions of another and caring so much you would use violence to control them is a good middle ground, but this middle ground is not to be confused with socialism.
Socialism is a system where government uses force to tell people what decisions they can and cannot make. There may be degrees of freedom within different socialist systems, just as a prisoner may be treated better or worse by different wardens, but if you are not free, you are not free.
Capitalism is an economic system that allows people to make choices free from government intervention; all government intervention is backed by the threat of violence — if it were not, it would not be a government policy, but rather a voluntary recommendation, or a rule of a voluntary association. The fact that one cannot avoid taxation and obedience to government without physical consequences proves that it is not a voluntary institution, but rather one backed by force.
Advocating a “mixed economy” or a middle ground between socialism and capitalism is nothing more than advocating a middle ground between threatening your neighbor with violence if he doesn’t do your will and not threatening him with violence. If he resists, it becomes the same as the “middle ground” between murder and non- murder. In that sense, capitalism is an extreme, just as courage is an extreme against non-courage.”
I do not have to further convince the reader that the argument above is tendentious, logically unsustainable, but certainly deserving to hold a serious argument about. How come these days the trashers of socialism are allowed to get away with outright misrepresentation and slander, while their critics have allowed themselves to be reduced to the role of a leftist fringe, with the public perception seeing this fringe as a threat to no less than American democracy as such. So far, as I see, it is the other way round. It wasn’t the socialists who had brought about the global financial crisis. On the contrary, it was the adepts and practitioners of the ideology of non-productive money-centered selfishness and greed, whose unsavory economic machinations had been, together with the political machinations of the neoconservative militaristic adventurers, the real cause of the recent woes, and it is this cozy crowd of economic neoliberals and political neoconservatives who may well constitute the biggest threat to American prosperity, democracy and freedom today.
As for the extended piece of anti-socialist rhetoric above, I am sure that Aristotle would have agreed with me and would have been quite appalled at being used in such an unwholesome fashion. And, besides, he would not have been a fan of modern-day financial capitalism at all...
Through Keynes’s “Aristotelity” (this is my Hobbesian inspeak) that “nothing is more unjust than to treat unequals equally,” we get to Aristotle’s directly relevant sentence in Politics: “Justice is equality, but only for equals; and justice is inequality, but only for those who are unequal.”
Indeed, Aristotle mentions two types of equality: numerical and proportional, the first being egalitarian, the second being reasonably conditioned by the inequality of the original input, and opts for the second type, as Keynes would do, in the first quote above.
But this kind of preference, on the part of Aristotle and Keynes, says nothing about the comparative merits of capitalism and socialism, as socialism does not encourage numerical equality, but unquestionably takes the proportional measure. As was written in the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor.” (Chapter I, Article 12.) Where is egalitarianism here?
It is thus ridiculous to represent Aristotle’s rejection of egalitarianism as his philosophical denunciation of socialism and embrace of capitalism, as capitalist apologists, such as, for instance, Isaac M. Morehouse, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, would want us to believe. Here is a typical argument on that account, which comes to us courtesy of the aforementioned Mr. Morehouse (from his article Aristotle on Mixed Economies, in the Mises Daily publication of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, June 26, 2008. Ironically, this “Austrian-sounding” libertarian-capitalist institution was founded in 1982 in the American State of Alabama. I will have much more to say about von Mises, and separately about American libertarian capitalism [as opposed to libertarian socialism] later on in this section.)---
“As Aristotle put it:
'But not every action, nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g., spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and such like things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excess or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong.'
The midpoint between murder and nonmurder is not a good choice: nonmurder is. However, the moderation between not caring a lick about the actions of another and caring so much you would use violence to control them is a good middle ground, but this middle ground is not to be confused with socialism.
Socialism is a system where government uses force to tell people what decisions they can and cannot make. There may be degrees of freedom within different socialist systems, just as a prisoner may be treated better or worse by different wardens, but if you are not free, you are not free.
Capitalism is an economic system that allows people to make choices free from government intervention; all government intervention is backed by the threat of violence — if it were not, it would not be a government policy, but rather a voluntary recommendation, or a rule of a voluntary association. The fact that one cannot avoid taxation and obedience to government without physical consequences proves that it is not a voluntary institution, but rather one backed by force.
Advocating a “mixed economy” or a middle ground between socialism and capitalism is nothing more than advocating a middle ground between threatening your neighbor with violence if he doesn’t do your will and not threatening him with violence. If he resists, it becomes the same as the “middle ground” between murder and non- murder. In that sense, capitalism is an extreme, just as courage is an extreme against non-courage.”
I do not have to further convince the reader that the argument above is tendentious, logically unsustainable, but certainly deserving to hold a serious argument about. How come these days the trashers of socialism are allowed to get away with outright misrepresentation and slander, while their critics have allowed themselves to be reduced to the role of a leftist fringe, with the public perception seeing this fringe as a threat to no less than American democracy as such. So far, as I see, it is the other way round. It wasn’t the socialists who had brought about the global financial crisis. On the contrary, it was the adepts and practitioners of the ideology of non-productive money-centered selfishness and greed, whose unsavory economic machinations had been, together with the political machinations of the neoconservative militaristic adventurers, the real cause of the recent woes, and it is this cozy crowd of economic neoliberals and political neoconservatives who may well constitute the biggest threat to American prosperity, democracy and freedom today.
As for the extended piece of anti-socialist rhetoric above, I am sure that Aristotle would have agreed with me and would have been quite appalled at being used in such an unwholesome fashion. And, besides, he would not have been a fan of modern-day financial capitalism at all...
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