"An anti-capitalist ethic continues to develop on the basis of errors by people who condemn the wealth-generating institutions to which they themselves owe their existence. “Pretending to be lovers of freedom, they condemn private property, contract, competition, advertising, profit, and even money itself.
“Imagining that their reason can tell them how to arrange human efforts to serve their innate wishes better, they pose a grave threat to civilisation.”~ F. A. Hayek on anti-capitalism sentiment in the West, from his book The Fatal Conceit: the Errors of Socialism
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This was perhaps true in Hayek’s day but not all of it is true today. Modern anti-capitalists have given up any pretence of believing in freedom. They simply don’t like the results of freedom, and simply want to force people to do something different.
It’s also true that they can use ‘reason’ (if you call their thinking that) to achieve their innate wishes. If you want to destroy economic growth because you think it’s bad for the environment, or distribute wealth from those who produce it to those that don’t, you can put in place policies to effectively achieve that. The problem is in what those innate wishes are.
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