Reddit reviews In Defense of Global Capitalism

The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge.

In Defense of Global Capitalism, by Johan Norberg.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon.

The Road to Serfdom by F A Hayek.

Asquith, by Roy Jenkins.

This is a weird one, but Woodrow Wilson by John Milton Cooper Jr. This influenced me a lot, but it obviously won't have the same effect on everyone.

> If you claim that someone creating something entitles them to profits from that thing in perpetuity, even if they themselves have so many of the thing that they can't even use them all, then you are quite simply not a reasonable person and why should anyone take you seriously?

Slow down, that is for those people to decide. If a worker and an employer want to work together on that basis, they're free to do so, are they not? If the worker does not agree with your assessment of that situation, will you force them to do things your way?

If so, you are a tyrant.

If you want to not get a job based on your assessment, you're free to pursue other means of making an income, but you do not get to decide that for other people.

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> I didn't claim "let's have no property norms." I am perfectly ok with enforcing property norms, I want to know why yours are worthy of accepting.

Wherever two people choose to associate based on a norm, that norm is acceptable between those two people as a function of agreement.

Find someone willing to associate with you on your preferred norm and leave alone those you disagree with. You certainly do not get to just walk on scene and declare others' norms invalid and begin stealing their shit.

Regardless of anything else you think, that much should be acceptable to you as a matter of course.

But if you want a claim as to why one group of norms is superior to another, it's based on the outcomes created for people employing those norms.

Socialist norms have a non-zero chance of ruining the economy and leaving entire populations starving.

Capitalist norms have brought billions out of poverty in modern times and no one ever starves to death.

For most people, the choice is clear just purely on the basis of those historical outcomes.

If you still want to try other norms, I defend your right to try and not have our norms forced on you, but you may still have to suffer under norms you disagree with to get enough resources to try other norms, because the burden is on you in such a case.

You no longer have the option to farm because all of our ancestors had that option and chose not to farm, so that option has mainly disappeared now. If you want to go back to farming, you must now buy a farm.

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> My belief is that in the long run, regardless of whether capitalist property norms are "fair," they lead to the undeterred proliferation of capital to the detriment of all.

And yet economic history is against you on this one. For literally thousands of years, humankind did not get enough to eat.

And yet, since the rise of modern capitalism, global dire poverty defined as living on less than $1 a day in 1900 money has gone from 90% of the world to less than 10% today, and will be 0% in less than 30 years.

To deny that capitalism has achieved this, something that no previous economic system has, is to deny the undeniable.

And the wealth stats are against you too. Everyone in the 1st world has a 10% chance of being a top 10% income earner at least one year of their life. And who is in that 10% changes dramatically from year to year, it's not the same people every time.

And capitalism quite literally invented a middle class that did not exist prior to it, directly capitalism to serve the masses, not the rich. The masses have far more money.

Johan Norberg "In Defense of Global Capitalism." Read it.

I was never a gun-lover or a property fetishist, but I have considered myself an anarchist for a long time (in the sense used in the pamphlet "Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!") and did like Ayn Rand as a teenager. What really led me to the "fiscal conservativism" I trusted to for a while was that I was (and basically still am) a utilitarian and therefore my preference of policies was predicated on what I believed would be best for the world.

Considering that, the biggest influence, then, was a book, In Defense of Global Capitalism, which had a bunch of then-convincing statistics about how trade liberalization helps even the poorest etc. etc. I'm still not sure what's problematic with the statistics per se (I would love to see them debunked or discussed somehow), but after a while they just stopped adding up with the rest of what I understood about the world as I slid left "economically" into socialism: if nothing else, trade liberalization can't be helping all the poor, 'cause we sure as shit got lots of free trade and we still got lots of poor.

Then one day I read People's History--that book, along with a conversation with a patient feminist friend of mine calling me out on some sexist thinking I was doing, catalyzed a rapid and potent mutation in my political understanding.

If your coming from the left I recommend In Defense of Global Capitalism

If your coming from the right maybe For a New Liberty (free online) or Rollback


Other classics:


Anarchy, State, and Utopia -Academic Philosophy, tough read

Economics in One Lesson - Econ, easy read

Man, Economy and State (also free) - Econ, tough read

As for critics of Libertarianism there are tons of them, from idiots like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore to well respected economists. I would check out someone like Amartya Sen. If you read about criticisms of the free market or capitalism for the love of god read someone who is actually criticizing capitalism and not corporatism.

>capital is an inherently inhumane system that will (as seen) always degrade our quality of life.

And then you go one to say that:

>our world has advanced at such a break neck pace in the past century

Quality of life in America is among the best in the world. Even the poorest people have access to television. Our poverty line is $20,444. There has been no evidence ("as seen") to suggest that capitalism will "degrade our quailty of life." Quite to the contrary, we have 232 years of evidence that capitalism raises the quality of life.

Read In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg. Full of statistics, charts, graphs, and real solid evidence for what capitalism has done quantitatively for quality of life the world over.