Capitalism
Capitalist
Property Rights
Profits
Innovation
Credit Creation
Reckless
Banking
Profit-Making
Essence of
Economic
Activity
Competitive
Capitalism
Free Private
Enterprise
Exchange
Economy
Business Cycle
Contracts
Exploitation
Domination
Greed
Selfishness
Money
Bandits
Religion of
Money
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Mencius.
"'Don't talk about profit,'
said Mencius. 'It's Humanity and Duty that
matter. Emperors say How can I profit my nation? Lords
say How can I profit my house? And everyone else says How
can I profit myself? Then everyone high and low is
scrambling for profit, pitching the nation into grave danger.'"
[I.1]1a*
"' . . To rise at the cock's cry and chase
profits with untiring diligence -- that is to be a
follower of Chih the bandit. . . '" [XIII.25]1b
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The
Nature of the Universe.
" . . .
[I]n their greed of gain [men]
amass a fortune out of civil bloodshed: piling wealth on wealth,
they heap carnage on carnage. With heartless glee they
welcome a brother's tragic death. They hate and fear the
hospitable board of their own kin. Often, in the same spirit and
influenced by the same fear, they are consumed with envy
at the sight of another's success . . . Some sacrifice life itself
for the sake of statues and a title. Often from fear of
death mortals are gripped by such a hate of living . . . they
do themselves to death. They forget that this very fear is
the fountainhead of their troubles: this it is that
harasses conscience, snaps the bonds of friendship and hurls down
virtue from the heights."1a
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Rights
of Man.
"The obscurity in which the origin of
all the present old governments is buried, implies the iniquity
and disgrace with which they began. . . Those bands of
robbers having parcelled out the world, and divided it into dominions,
began . . . to quarrel with each other. . . What at
first was plunder, assumed the softer name of revenue
. . .
From such beginning of governments, what could be expected, but a continual
system of war and extortion? It has established itself into a trade."1a
Dissertation
on First Principles.
"When rights are
secure, property is secure in consequence. But when property
is made a pretence for unequal or exclusive rights, it weakens the
right to hold property, and provokes indignation and tumult . . . "1
"The first
aristocrats in all countries were brigands."1c*
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Capital.
Volume 1.
"The
restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is
what [the capitalist] aims at. This boundless greed
after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is
common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is
merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational
miser."1a
"The capitalist knows that all commodities,
however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are
in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised
Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of
money to make more money."1b
[Karl Marx was born of a German-Jewish family converted to
Christianity2a]
"The capitalist system presupposes
the complete separation of the labourers from all property in
the means by which they can realise their labour. . .
The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else
than the historical process of divorcing the producer from
the means of production."1c
Capital.
Volume 3.
"Accumulation of capital in the form of
the national debt . . . means nothing more than the growth
of a class of state creditors with a preferential
claim to certain sums from the overall proceeds of taxation."2b
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Business Cycles.
" . . .
[C]apitalism is
that form of private property economy in which innovations are
carried out by means of borrowed money . . . "1a
"It was the financing of
innovation by credit creation . . . which is at the bottom
of that 'reckless banking.'"1b
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The Virtue
of Selfishness.
"Without property rights, no other rights are
possible."1a
"Today, few people know what capitalism is . . . "1b
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Technology
Management and Society.
"In government, modern technology and
the modern economy founded on it have outmoded the national
state as a viable unit."1a
"The first great code of law, that
of Hammurabi, almost four thousand years ago, would still be applicable
to a good deal of legal business in today's highly
developed, industrial society."1b
"To take risk is . . . the essence
of economic activity."1c
"Managers today cannot take the time
to understand, because they don't have it."1d
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Capitalism and
Freedom.
"The possibility of co-ordination through voluntary
co-operation rests on the elementary - yet frequently denied -
proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit
from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally
voluntary and informed.
Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion.
A working model of a society organized through voluntary exchange
is a free private enterprise exchange economy - what
we have been calling competitive capitalism."1a* |
Corporate
Canada.
" . . . Either
we shall passively suffer our situation of economic domination,
and then it would be better to be annexed outright to the United States, rather than be a
colony exploited without limit. Or else we shall interfere vigorously in the game of
economic forces . . . "1a
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A People's History of the United
States.
" . . . [C]ontracts made
between rich and poor, between employer and employee, landlord and
tenant, creditor and debtor, generally favor the more powerful
of the two parties."1a
"Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower
classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes."1b
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The Essence
of Capitalism.
"
. . . [U]sing Hobbesian logic, I revealed
Capitalism as a Religion of Money (banks as churches,
bankers as clergy, loan applications as auricular confessions, bankruptcies as
excommunications, credit bureaus as index librorum prohibitorum, etc.)."1a
The confines of Capitalism are
simply too narrow, too Ptolemaic -- money cannot be the center
of life. Capitalism, therefore, cannot be "the proper way
to be free."1a It must be surpassed. The trinity of
Capitalism -- Usurer-Entrepreneur-Technology1b
-- must
be transcended with the trinity of Mind, Life, and Justice.1b
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Social
Responsibility
The People
Social
Profitability
Wretchedness
Bankruptcies
Expropriation
Slavery
Recklessness
Alienation
Indentured
Servitude
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Mencius.
"'The people are the most
precious of all things. Next come the gods of soil and grain.
The sovereign matters least. . . '" [XIV.14]1c
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Capital.
Volume 3.
"[T]the pioneering entrepreneurs generally go
bankrupt, and it is only their successors who flourish, thanks
to their possession of cheaper buildings, machinery etc. Thus
it is generally the most worthless and wretched kind of
money-capitalists that draw the greatest profit from
all new developments of the universal labour of the human
spirit and their social application by combined labour."2a
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Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy.
"The perfectly
bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the
small or medium-sized firm and 'expropriates' its owners,
but in the end it also ousts the entrepreneur . . . "2a
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Technology
Management and Society.
"Aware that we are living in the midst
of a technological revolution, we are becoming increasingly
concerned with its meaning for the individual and its impact on
freedom, on society, and on our political institutions.
Side by side with messianic promises of utopia to be ushered in by
technology, there are the most dire warnings of man's enslavement
by technology, his alienation from himself and from
society, and the destruction of all human and political
values."1e
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Capitalism and
Freedom.
"Few trends
could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free
society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social
responsibility other than to make as much money for their
stockholders as possible."1b
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Corporate
Canada.
"Social
profitability must take precedence over economic
profitability: houses, schools and hospitals must come before
factories and mills . . . "1b
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A People's History of the United
States.
"It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million
human beings to death and slavery . . . at the hands of slave
traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the
countries deemed the most advanced in the world."1c |
Bank-Induced
Risks.
"Today, people around the
world are giving themselves up recklessly to the 'calculative thinking'2a of the marketplace. People calculate what is
better -- a loan or a lease --; but, they seldom reflect on the meaning of
usury. Why?
Because they are too busy being indentured."2 |
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*
Italics in the original.
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1 Mencius. Mencius. Translated with an Introduction
by David Hinton. David Hinton, 1998. Washington, DC: COUNTERPOINT,
member of the Perseus Books Group.
a Emperor Hui Liang, Book One, I.1, at 3.
b To Fathom the Mind, Book One, XIII.25, at 244.
c To Fathom the Mind, Book Two, XIV.14, at 261.
d Emperor Hui Liang, Book One, I.7, at 16.
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1
Lucretius.
The
Nature of the Universe. Translated
and with an Introduction by R.E. Latham. Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books Ltd.
a Life and Mind, at 98.
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1
Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Rights
of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings. at
71.
a
Rights of Man (1792), Ch. 11, Of the Origin of
the Present Old Governments, at 220-221.
b
Dissertation on the First Principles of Government,
at 400.
c
Dissertation on the First Principles of Government,
at 401.
d
American Crisis at 64.
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1 Karl Marx (1818-1883). Capital: An
Abridged Edition.
Edited with an Introduction by David McLellan.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995.
From Volume 1
a Part II, Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital,
at 98.
b Part II, Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital,
at 99.
c Part VIII, Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive
Accumulation, at 364.
2 Karl Marx. Capital: A
Critique of Political Economy.
Volume 3.
Translated by David Fernbach with an Introduction by Ernest
Mandel. Edition and notes, New Left Review, 1981. Translation,
David Fernbach, 1981. Introduction, Ernest Mandel, 1981. London,
UK: Penguin Group.
a
Marx's biography at 1.
a
Chapter 5: Economy in the Use of Constant Capital,
at 199.
b
Chapter 30: Money Capital and Real Capital: I, at
607.
c
Chapter 33: The Means of Circulation under the Credit
System, at 678-679.
d
Chapter 33, at 679. Quotation from G. M. Bell, a Scottish bank director,
in The Philosophy of Joint-Stock Banking, London, 1840, pp.
46, 47.
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1 Joseph
A. Schumpeter. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical
and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist
Process (1939). Abridged, with an Introduction, by
Rendigs Fels. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1964. (Reprinted
1989 by Porcupine Press, Inc., Philadelphia PA.)
a Capitalism defined, at 179.
b "Reckless banking," at 197.
2 Joseph
A. Schumpeter. Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (1942). 3rd ed. Introduction
by Tom Bottomore. Joseph A. Schumpeter, 1942, 1947. Harper &
Row, Publishers, Inc., 1950. George Allen & Unwin (Publishers)
Ltd., 1976. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
(Originally pub. by Harper & Brothers.)
a Crumbling Walls, at 131-142.
b Prologue, at 61-61.
c The Process of Creative Destruction, at 81-86.
d Decomposition, at 156-163.
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1 Ayn Rand (1905-1982). The Virtue of
Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. With additional
articles by Nathaniel Branden. Ayn Rand, 1961, 1964. The Objectivist
Newsletter, Inc., 1962, 1963, 1964. New York, NY: Penguin Books USA,
Inc. (A Signet Book.)
a The Objectivist Ethics, at 36.
b The Objectivist Ethics, at 37.
c Government Financing in a Free Society, at 136.
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1
Peter F. Drucker (b. 1909).
Technology
Management and Society: Essays. Peter F. Drucker,
1958, 1959, 1961, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970. New York, NY: Harper &
Row, Publishers, Inc., 1977.
a
Ch. 5: Technology and
Society in the Twentieth Century, at 90. Reprinted from Technology
in Western Civilization, vol. II, edited by Melvin Kranzberg and
Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., Regents of the University of Wisconsin,
1967.
b
Ch. 7: The First
Technological Revolution and Its Lessons, at 119. Presidential
address to the Society for the History of Technology, December 29,
1965; First published in Technology and Culture, Spring 1966.
c
Ch. 8: Long-Range
Planning, at 132. Reprinted from Management Science, vol. 5,
no. 3 (April 1959); based on a paper given before the Fourth
International Meeting of the Institute of Management Sciences,
Detroit, October 17-18, 1957.
d
Ch. 10: The Manager and
the Moron, at 175. First published in The McKinsey Quarterly,
Spring 1967.
e
Ch. 7, at 117.
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1
Milton Friedman. Capitalism
and Freedom. With the assistance of Rose D. Friedman.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 1962, 1982.
a
The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political
Freedom, at 13.
b
Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business
and Labor, at 133.
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1
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
(1919-2000).
The
Economic Domination of Canada, in
Corporate
Canada: 14 Probes into the Workings of a Branch-Plant Economy.
Edited by Rae Murphy and Mark Starowicz. Introduction by Mel
Watkins. Toronto, ON: Canadian Journalism Foundation Incorporated,
1972. Toronto, ON: James Lewis & Samuel, Publishers, at
153-156. (Extracts from an essay in
Cit�
Libre, May 1958, reprinted in the
Last
Post, May 1972.)
a
At 154.
b
At 155.
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1
Howard Zinn. A People's History of the United
States 1492-Present. Revised and updated ed. Howard
Zinn, 1980, 1995. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
a
A Kind of Revolution, at 99.
b
The Coming Revolt of the Guards, at 624.
c
Drawing the Color Line, at 29.
d
The Coming Revolt of the Guards, at 622 and 627.
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1
Edward E. Ayoub, with the assistance of Trudé K. Ayoub.
The
Essence of Capitalism. Toronto, ON: Macroknow
Inc., 2000.
a
Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche's thought of
"'justice' . . . as the proper way to be free"; see
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. III: The Will to Power as
Knowledge and as Metaphysics, at 142. Translated by Joan Stambaugh,
David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi. Edited, with Notes and
an Analysis, by David Farrell Krell. David Farrell Krell, 1987.
New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1987.
b
For
Oswald Spengler: the trinity consists of "the
entrepreneur, the engineer and the factory-worker"; the
entrepreneur and the factory-worker "become slaves . . . of
the machine"; the danger comes from "the dictature of
money"; and the "battle is the despairing struggle of
technical thought to maintain its liberty against
money-thought." See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the
West, at 409-415. (Vol. I, 1926; Vol. II, 1928). Abridged ed.
by Helmut Werner. English abridged edition prepared by Arthur
Helps, from the translation by Charles Francis Atkinson. Preface
by H. Stuart Hughes. H. Stuart Hughes, 1991. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
2
Edward E. Ayoub.
Bank-Induced
Risks.
Toronto,
Ontario: Macroknow Inc., 1998.
a
Heidegger's expression.
The Principle of
Reason, at 122 and 129 (on "calculative thinking" vs.
"reflective thinking"). Translated by Reginald Lilly. Verlag Gunther Neske,
Pfullingen, 1957 (Der Satz vom Grund). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1991.
3
Edward E. Ayoub, with the assistance of
Trudé K. Ayoub.
World War III
Against The Money Trust? Book III, Chapter 1: The
Essence of Capitalism. Toronto, Ontario: Macroknow Inc., 1998.
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