Capitalism? |  |
What is Capitalism? Published 1965 |
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal |
Ayn Rand answers...
There are only two fundamental questions (or two aspects of the same question) that determine the nature of any social system: Does a social system recognize individual rights? - and: Does a social system ban physical force from human relationships? The answer to the second question is the practical implementation of the answer to the first.Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products - or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products? Does man have a right to exist for his own sake - or is he born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear?
This is the first question to answer. The rest is consequences and practical implementations. The basic issue is only: Is man free?
In mankind's history, capitalism is the only system that answers: Yes.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man's rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man's right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.
It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature - the connection between his survival and his use of reason - that capitalism recognizes and protects.
