Socialism is the social system, which instigates envy and self-sacrifice: It is the social system, which uses compulsion and, in some cases, the organized violence of the state to extract wealth from the producer class for its redistribution to everyone else.
Capitalism is the only moral system because it requires human beings to interact with each other as traders--that is, as free moral agents trading and selling goods and services on the basis of mutual consent.
Capitalism is the only just system because the sole criterion that determines the value of thing exchanged is the free, voluntary and the universal judgment of the consumer.
It is both moral and just because the degree to which man rises or falls in society is determined by the degree to which he uses his mind. Capitalism is the only, and I repeat, the only social system that rewards merit, ability and achievement, regardless of one's birth or status in life.
Yes, there are winners and losers in capitalism. The winners are those who are honest, industrious, thoughtful, prudent, frugal, responsible, disciplined, and efficient. The losers are those who are shiftless, lazy, imprudent, extravagant, negligent, impractical, and inefficient.
Capitalism is the only social system that rewards virtue and punishes vice. This applies to the business executive and the carpenter, the lawyer and the factory worker.
But how does the successful entrepreneurial mind work? Have you ever wondered about the amount of time and the hard work the men and women who invented penicillin, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the radio, the electric light, canned food, air conditioning, and playboy magazine?
What are the characteristics of the successful entrepreneur? The entrepreneur is that man or woman with unlimited drive, initiative, insight, energy, daring creativity, optimism and ingenuity. The entrepreneur is the man who sees in every field a potential garden, in every seed an apple. Wealth starts with ideas in people's heads.
The entrepreneur is therefore above all else a man of the mind. The entrepreneur is the man who is constantly thinking of new ways to improve the material or spiritual lives of the greatest number of people.
And what are the social and political conditions, which encourage or inhibit the entrepreneurial mind? The free-enterprise system is not possible without the sanctity of private property, the freedom of contract, free trade and the rule of law.
But the one thing that the entrepreneur values are freedom--the freedom to experiment, invents and produces. The one thing that the entrepreneur dreads is government intervention. Government taxation and regulation are the means by which social planners punish and restrict the man or woman of ideas.
Welfare, regulations, taxes, tariffs, minimum-wage laws are all immoral because they use the coercive power of the state to organize human choice and action, such as those in a socialistic society. They’re immoral because they inhibit or deny the freedom to choose how we live our lives; they're immoral because they deny our right to live as autonomous moral agents; and they're immoral because they deny our essential humanity. If you think this is hyperbole, stop paying your taxes for a year or two and see what happens.
In a free capitalist society individuals must choose for themselves how they will order their lives and the values they will pursue. Under socialism, most of life's decisions are made for you.
Both socialism and capitalism have motivation programs. Under socialism there are built-in incentives to shirk responsibility. There is no reason to work harder than anyone else because the rewards are shared and therefore minimal to the hard-working individual; indeed, the incentive is to work less than others because the immediate loss is shared and therefore minimal to the slacker.
Under capitalism, the incentive is to work harder because each producer will receive the total value of his production--the rewards are not shared. Simply put: socialism rewards sloth and penalizes hard work while capitalism rewards hard work and penalizes the sloths.
Is that what YOU want?
