Publicani

Many people are confused and misled by widely accepted wrong definitions and notions of capitalism. Check this latest example, the New York Times Sunday Book Review on Ayn Rand:

But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable.

Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done.

So, what do you think capitalism is? Making a buck? Greed is good? Dog eats dog?

The following generally accepted definition, displayed even in Wiki, is equally misleading:

Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital, the non-labor factors of production also known as the means of production, is privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in markets; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor.

Are you ready for the definition of capitalism? Want to think a little more?
Here it is:
Capitalism is a social system wherein two adults can freely enter into any contract between themselves.

When two people are not able to enter freely into a contract – it’s not capitalism. When one adult can freely pay another willing adult to medically treat him, that’s capitalism. When another person has to be preapproved (licensed) by somebody else, or when the treatment should be preapproved by somebody else (FDA), or when the payment should be received only from another person preapproved by somebody else (insurance), or when either of them has to pay to somebody else for the entering into the contract (taxes), then it is not capitalism.

What Ayn Rand and her publisher did was a true example of capitalistic exchange: both entered freely into a contract. Ayn Rand got something worthy from this contract, otherwise she wouldn’t have entered it. And the publisher did. The idiot who wrote the article doesn’t understand it:

Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done.It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre.