7 years ago (edited)
The definition of capitalism is that the means of production are privately owned. Since when has it ever worked to have the means of production publicly owned? I'm not talking about services that protect our rights or public works like roads, but 100% of the means of production. How would you like to live in the Soviet Union?
Having a free market means that you are free to make choices; the opposite is tyranny. Suppose you want to start a business. You might not be allowed because your business doesn't fit the official paradigm. Besides, you have no money to invest and no medium of exchange with which to conduct business. You are completely dependent on the state to make decisions for you. Some think it is fairer if the system is "democratic," but tyranny is still tyranny. There is no room for innovators like Steve Jobs in such a society.
Suppose you want to own a yacht or eat steak every day for breakfast. There are never going to be infinite resources that allow everyone to own a yacht and eat steak. Either nobody has these luxuries, or there are those who are arbitrarily rewarded by the political system, making them the privileged class. It would be nearly impossible to earn these things through your own efforts unless those efforts were in service to someone more powerful than you. In a free market, these things are decided by the choices people make about whom they want to give their money to. Voluntary exchanges, as opposed to involuntary ones imposed by the state, reward those who provide the most value to other people.
A society in which you have no ability to improve your lot in life beyond what the state allows is, by definition, a slave state. Impose a one-size-fits-all lifestyle on everyone, and people will immediately begin to rebel against it.
Communism and its variants are not just as corrupt as capitalism, but always more so. People resent that, in a free market, some people end up much better off than others, but disparities in wealth are never eliminated under the various forms of communism. Instead, the poor often end up worse off. Allowing some people to be more successful than others in a free market is an essential motivator for innovation, investment, and hard work.
People respond to incentives in just about everything they do, including whether they work, how much they work, and for whom they work. Incentives also influence what people choose to spend their money on.
Money is essential for managing scarce resources. Prices change according to the laws of supply and demand, and prices send critically important signals about how resources should be managed. Suppose there is a temporary shortage of orange juice and the price goes up. People will switch to something cheaper, like grape juice. When eggs are cheap, more people will eat eggs. When eggs are expensive, more people will eat something else. Eliminate money, and resources will immediately become mismanaged. There is no way that centralized control, automated or otherwise, can properly decide how many resources to allocate and use. State control is never as effective as individuals deciding for themselves how best to serve their own needs. State control will result in shortages like those we have seen in Venezuela. Black markets will form because people prefer to make their own choices.
