"Capitalism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)

As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire because it opened world channels of energy for commerce in general. Though repressive (status) government was still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with very bad results, on the whole England's invisible exports were law and free trade. Practically speaking, while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.2

As in the case of Rome, when the repressive element of England's mixed economy grew to become her dominant policy and turned her to statism, her empire fell apart It was not military force that had held it together.

Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force. The same type of businessmen who sought special advantages by government action in their own countries, sought special markets by government action abroad. At whose expense? At the expense of the overwhelming majority of businessmen who paid the taxes for such ventures, but gained nothing. Who justified such policies and sold them to the public? The statist intellectuals who manufao

" Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964, p. 121. Originally published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1943.

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tured such doctrines as "the public interest" or "national prestige" or "manifest destiny."

The actual war profiteers of all mixed economies were and are of that type: men with political pull who acquire fortunes by government favor, during or after a war fortunes which they could not have acquired on a free market.

Remember that private citizens whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers have no power to start a war. That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government. Which type of government is more likely to plunge a country into war: a government of limited powers, bound by constitutional restrictions or an unlimited government, open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests or ideologies, a government able to command armies to march at the whim of a single chief executive?

Yet it is not a limited government that today's peace-lovers are advocating.

(Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man's right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.)

So long as a country is even semi-free, its mixed-economy profiteers are not the source of its warlike influences or policies, and are not the primary cause of its involvement in war. They are merely political scavengers cashing-in on a public trend. The primary cause of that trend is the mixed-economy intellectuals.

Observe the link between statism and militarism in the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just as the destruction of capitalism and the rise of the totalitarian state were not caused by business or labor or any economic interests, but by the dominant statist ideology of the intellectuals so the resurgence of the doctrines of military conquest and armed crusades for political "ideals" were the product of the same intellectuals' belief that "the good" is to be achieved by force.

The rise of a spirit of nationalistic imperialism in the

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United States did not come from the right, but from the left, not from big-business interests, but from the collectivist reformers who influenced the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. For a history of these influences, see The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur A. Ekiroh, Js

In such instances [writes Professor Ekirch] as title progressives' increasing acceptance of compulsory military training and of the white man's burden, there were obvious reminders of the paternalism of much of their economic reform legislation. Imperialism, according to a recent student of American foreign policy, was a revolt against many of the values of traditional liberalism. "The spirit of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest; the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect."4

In regard to Woodrow Wilson, Professor Ekirch writes:

Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of United States foreign trade to come about as a result of free international competition, but he found it easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize direct American intervention as a means of safeguarding the national interest.11

And: "He [Wilson] seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions which he conceived as liberal and democratic to the more benighted areas of the world."6 It was not the advocates of capitalism who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade it was the "liberal" magazine The New Republic. Its editor, Herbert Croly, used such arguments as: "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."

Just as Wilson, a "liberal" reformer, led the United States into World War I, "to make the world safe for democracy" so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another "liberal" reformer, led it into World War II, in the name of the "Four Freedoms." In

* New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955.

?JA/d, p. 189. The quotation on "the spirit of imperialism" comes from R. E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 47.

" /AM, p. 199.

"Ibid.

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