Jesse points us to an article by Bruce Judson, who posits:
Capitalism is not an abstract idea. It is an economic system with a distinct set of underlying principles that must exist in order for the system to work. One of these principles is equal justice. In its absence, parties will stop entering into transactions that create overall wealth for our society.What a rube. Capitalism as we know it today is premised on legalized theft designed to give the illusion of voluntary participation in a system designed to expropriate value created by the masses. If parties stop entering into transactions that create overall wealth for society, those at the top of the pyramid will just take the wealth for themselves, a truth that we see all too often these days.
The brutal application of power is what this is all about. The theory of capitalism was designed to mollify the idealistic intellectual who typified the classical liberal of the 18th century, who could not but help to notice the exploitation of the masses by the elite. Hayek and his neoliberal ilk just updated the approach to account for the counter-cultural socialist and communist movements, which themselves proved to be nothing more than the secular Protestants to the secular Catholics of classical liberalism, merely seeking to recast the power structure in their own images.
