"No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way that rewards rationality and penalises all forms of irrationality, including racism."
~ Ayn Rand, from her 1963 article 'Racism'
Monday, 13 November 2017
Quote of the Day: "No political system can establish universal rationality by law, but..."
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2 comments:
Yeah, that sure worked out well for the Slaves in the free market economies of the US slave holding states, didn't it?
It was naked racism that fed the slave trade, and the slave trade, in turn, made the cotton growing states among the wealthiest in the world.
The thing is, David, capitalism didn't invent either poverty or slavery. It inherited both. it inherited both and, in the course of one century (post the industrial revolution) where capitalism was most embraced it ended slavery (peacefully in all but the US) and within two centuries it's almost ended world poverty (where now, for the first time, fewer than 10 percent of the world's human beings live in absolute poverty -- "the biggest gains in the fight against poverty [having] occurred in countries that have opened up their markets.")
Oh yes, and a fun fact: did you now why the nineteenth-century's free-market economists got the moniker "the dismal science" slapped on their discipline by big-government types? Answer: Because their discipline opposed slavery. Look it up. (Clue: It was Thomas Carlyle who made up the term.)
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