28 Mar 2010

The Bounty of Capitalism

Economics 2 Comments

I just posted this over at the Mises Blog. I am disagreeing with Sheldon Richman’s critique of the word capitalism for libertarian usage. An excerpt:

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This was all driven home for me when Grayson Lilburne sent me an email on Friday. We are working out the bugs before we formally launch the promotion for the Mises Academy and the online business cycle course I will be leading. (Official details soon!) But here was Grayson’s quick note to me:

Great! I tried the web meeting software a bit. But I definitely want to test it out with you, and then figure out a way to somehow test its ability to handle a large number of participants…I’m going to drop my wife and her friend off at Disneyland and then set up shop in a Starbucks with my laptop (should only take a couple hours or so), and then be available for doing…Video stuff the rest of the day. But I’ll have my iphone before that, so feel free to e-mail me questions.
Grayson

Just reflect on what he is saying in the above. That would have been science fiction not very long ago. Incidentally, once Grayson got set up–in a coffee shop–to work, he and I were talking over a video connection. He was some 2,000 miles away from me at that point.

Note that this didn’t happen in a libertarian novel where “the freed market” is allowed to operate. This happened in our current, real-world United States. I say chalk one (or more like 1 million) up to capitalism.

2 Responses to “The Bounty of Capitalism”

  1. Louis B. says:
    at

    Bread and circus…

  2. Contemplationist says:
    at

    This is my major beef with the left-libertarians. They are as utopia-bound as Marxists and no I don’t mean that in a glib way to score points. Yes the current system is not a ‘free-market’ theoretically of course!
    But when have there been totally freed markets? Yes I wish we would get there. I will support you in this task. However, stop denigrating the ACTUAL achievements that the little freedom thats left in the economic sector has produced…even with the cronyism of patents/copyrights.
    We must NOT shy away from the actual ‘bounty of capitalism’ as you so well put it We must strive to improve it.