“The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry—and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand. Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847)
Evidence is mounting in the Last Days of this Dispensation of the Grace of God (2 Timothy 3:1–9) that a plurality, if not a majority, of my fellow Americans irrationally favor socialism’s economic illiteracy and despise the intelligibility of free markets. As there’s no point in arguing with those who stubbornly and impudently embrace irrationality, I thought I’d instead indulge in the pleasure of self-quotation on this point. It’s from my Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic (pp. 122-123; lightly edited).
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The free market is a good of order[1], as distinct from a good of satisfaction. The regular enjoyment of the latter goods requires that people regard the good of order as worthy of attainment and protection. That is, not just, for example, “This meal for me now,” but also “Good meals for me and my family several times a day, every day.”
People face a moral challenge when they realize that they can enjoy a good of satisfaction only by rending the fabric of the good of order. In the name of eudaimonia—that is, human flourishing—they may at times have to do without particular satisfactions.
Human beings enjoy essential freedom. That is, they are free by nature. They can conceive of alternative futures, prefer one of them, understand the causal path to it, and act to set that causal chain in motion.
But although it is natural for them to honor the good of order, they are capable of dishonoring and undermining it, perversely and self-destructively. That is, they can perceive a conflict between the good of order and a satisfaction attainable only at the cost of that order and elect to subordinate the order to the satisfaction.
That is, although they are naturally ordered to pursue a good life, which depends upon the good of order, people can, through their exercise of essential freedom, irrationally act to undermine that good.
One consequence is the diminution and even loss of their effective freedom, a constriction of the range of choice. Smokers, for example, have less effective freedom to quit smoking than they had when they started, even if their essential freedom to conceive of a smoke-free life has not diminished.
Human beings can, and do, inject the surd of sin into the historical equation, effectively “throwing a spanner in the works.” Sin is not just immoral: it is also irrational, absurd. There may be non-rational causes, but never a reason for it.
Note
[1] Social order is a public good, that is, it is a foundational, non-excludable, and non-rivalrous infrastructure that makes the production, trade, and regular consumption of all material goods possible. Without the predictability, contract enforcement, and physical safety provided by a stable social order, markets collapse into high-transaction-cost environments where long-term investment is impossible. The good of social order is the ultimate complementary good. It cannot be bought off a shelf, yet no other commercial good can be reliably consumed without it. It is non-rivalrous: one person benefiting from a safe, lawful neighborhood does not reduce the amount of safety available to anyone else. And once a framework of property rights is established within a territory, it is nearly impossible to exclude particular people from its protections.