CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. Please Don’t Call It Capitalism: It’s Not Just about the Money!

By calling the system of economic freedom, or (alternatively) commercial republicanism, by its Marxist label, its advocates are implying that the battle between socialist and free regimes was really about the competing interests of labor and “capital.” That is, socialist regimes supposedly advance the interests of workers (the vast majority of human beings) while capitalist ones just benefit greedy, materialistic plutocrats. As the current slogan of the American Communist Party puts it, Communists supposedly serve “People and Planet Before Profits.” (Stalin, Mao, and their cohorts, who lived in luxury while their subjects starved, would have a good, if private, laugh at that line!)

As already mentioned, the Times’s “1619 Project” exemplifies the error of blaming on “capitalism” what are really the consequences of arbitrary, corrupt, or merely private-interest-based government regulations that improperly interfere with the operation of the free-enterprise system – as well as, to the extent that their effects are still felt, of the pre-“capitalist” practices of slavery or serfdom.

As the Journal review of the Hulu series by economists David Henderson and Philip Magness demonstrates, the “1619 Project” inadvertently makes the case for economic freedom, since most of the contemporary injustices it cites resulted from government interventions that undercut free markets and property rights and therefore limited the opportunity for black advancement. These include the abuse of eminent domain, racial red-lining of Federally subsidized mortgages, minimum-wage laws originally designed to protect white workers in the North from competition by black migrants from the South who were willing to work for less, and governmental support and enforcement of labor monopolies by unions that systematically excluded blacks.

Read the whole thing.