I have an intelligent Facebook friend from India who has been on a tear, condemning Western civilization as the civilization of violence, conquest, theft and death.
A sample (reproduced without permission):
"A capitalist society is not built in a vacuum. Massive resources, including unearned wealth (gold, silver, coal, iron, petroleum, etc.), land (entire continents have to be subjugated), slave labor (millions of slaves), and colonies (for plunder, cheap labor, and resources), which are acquired through imperialistic and totalitarian methods, are necessary for developing the political and economic environment in which a capitalist society can arise. For a poor country, which has never been an imperialist power, capitalism is an unachievable ideal. The old truism, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” is valid for capitalist fortunes."
Normally, I appreciate commentary from a non-Western perspective, but I couldn't let this one stand without comment: My response:
"And how are communist societies built?
Your constant, one sided harangue of capitalist economics and Western civilization have become tiresome.
If I were of lesser intellect, I would simply excuse such a unilateral perspective as simply the sniping of someone resentful of a conquered ancestry, someone seeking to explain some sort of ancestral failure, but it is all just human nature. I have seen it displayed in sport - often the losing team excuses their loss by claiming the other team cheated, had help from the referees or simply played the game dirty.
Most of the time, they just lost."
The fact is, winners never seek counsel from the losers for a reason.
I see this “the ref’s cheated” approach applied in BLM, CRT, the Squad, the corporate world and pretty much the entire Democrat Party.
You lost, so your opposition obviously cheated.
What is capitalism?
At its most basic, capitalism is the free market philosophy that uses price as a signal to the market to change, to adjust. Capitalism isn’t a cause; it is an effect, a result. Capitalism rests upon a very simple concept, an economic transaction occurs at that point where a seller is willing to sell and a buyer is willing to buy. This one on one, individual philosophy allows the price of a good or service to be established by the individuals involved in the transaction based on the value of the transaction to each. In my mind, there is no or more equitable or fair method of economic transfer than this.
Capitalism is not moral, amoral or immoral.
Capitalism, or any economic system for that matter, is merely a reflection of the actions of individuals in a society. In a free society, the quality of that society (and in this case, the quality of the economic system) depends on the quality of individual. Both Rand and Friedman base their positions on the simple proposition that a society is comprised of individuals and those individuals, acting in their own best interests will yield the best result for society.
The classic collectivist decries the lack of morals and denigrates religion and God in the same breath…where do you suppose they believes morality originates?
This is another area where the godless collectivists get it totally wrong.
Morals are based on core principles and therefore are firm, fixed concepts. Morals are like ethics, they are absolute and binary, there are no degrees of morality or ethics, and one cannot be a little bit moral or a little bit ethical, one either is or isn’t. Since these are not variable concepts, they cannot be priced and therefore cannot be bought or sold.
What most collectivists point out as a fault, and it is a real one, is the inducement to abandon morality for a price. If that is possible, then the individual was never moral to begin with. I’ve heard it said that the ethical man knows he shouldn’t cheat on his wife, whereas the moral man actually wouldn’t.
If we had a nation committed to, and living by, the Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy Chapter 5, verses 6-21), we would not be having this conversation.
Edmund Burke understood a cardinal rule of society, the the vital connection between liberty and personal character. "All who have ever written on government are unanimous," he wrote, "that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist."
Burke was right then, he remains correct today.