Capitalism is Freedom and Anything Else is Socialism

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Frank Thomas (Conservatives and the Market for Alienation) took the stance that the true producers in this country were the blue collar workers and that larger government control over business was necessary.

According to Mr. Thomas workers wear blue collars and they are the true producers of goods and services in the United States. But do blue collar workers design the product, create accounting systems necessary to track costs for producing the product or to track sales of the product, decide where the product should be sold, decide what enhancements are necessary for the product to be more effective, or for that matter even where the product should be built?

Why do you think times are worse for blue-collar workers, Mr. Thomas? Could it be because businesses are trying to produce products at a lower cost and can do so by out-sourcing blue-collar work to foreign countries? Could it possibly be that prohibitive taxation by big government is causing this push? Could it be because Unions have a stranglehold on the companies that have not moved to right-to-work States? Mr. Thomas’ problem is he still lives in a perceived past that has Republicans as ‘evil fat cats’ sitting behind a big table in a board room with a bunch of other ‘evil fat cats’ trying to figure out how to take advantage of the workers in their company.

Mr. Thomas, take an Economics 101 class and figure out just who the producers in this country are. Businesses are trying to lower costs so that they will be able to sell more of their products to consumers, and in doing so their company is more profitable and they can spend some of those profits on research and development. They can also share those profits with stockholders in their company, which brings in more stockholders. Wall Street is not evil. Big business is not evil. Big government is evil.

In this country now there are loud voices in support of an expanded role for government. These are policies that have failed time and again; policies that lessen the capacity for human fulfillment and well-being; policies that put individuals in subservience to the state; policies that leech away our inalienable right to be free to choose. The Tea Party protesters are pushing back against those loud voices – we should not be taken lightly.