The other day I read something quite funny on a webpage: “capitalism creates selfishness.” For this type of Sunday thinker (almost a dangerous as his driving counterpart), selfishness is a relatively new phenomenon –to be precise, little more than 200 years old. In other words, in the 15^th century selfishness did not exist, the world lived in a kind of Garden of Eden!

 

It must also make us question the profession of some pre-Capitalist authors. According to this version of left-wing groupthink, Saint Thomas Aquinas would not be considered a philosopher or theologist, but a writer of science fiction able to jump 500 years into the future to the birth of the feeling or attitude called selfishness. But Aristotle’s work has even more merit, another science fiction writer whose imagination propelled him 2000 years into the future. 

 

It is common for people to confuse concepts. One example is selfishness and utility. Even the Royal Academy of Language defines selfishness as an “immoderate and excessive love of oneself, leading a person to attend disproportionately to self-interest, without caring for others.” The definition is careless as it leaves open to question what it means by “immoderate” and “excessive.” How can we measure that? What does “attend disproportionately to self-interest” mean? Am I acting selfishly when I put a coat on because I’m cold? Am I attending disproportionately to my self-interest?  

 

Economic action is born of each person’s marginal utility, and this is subjective. You acquire something because you like it, and the seller sells it to you because he prefers your money, which he later spends on something else he values more. This is not selfishness, but the satisfaction our needs. It doesn’t matter what those needs are because we are working peacefully and voluntarily with others. Voluntary commercial transactions are always legitimate, regardless whether we buy water, bread, tobacco, alcohol or substances the State unilaterally prohibits. We are not hurting anyone. Whoever tries to stop us using force is killing our freedom and, de facto, is a tyrant.

 

What is truly twisted and perverse is to try to eliminate freedom with absurd moral slogans whose only agenda is to impose someone else’s morality through coercion and force (laws, taxes, healthy mottos…) on people who are not committing any criminal act.  

 

Unfortunately, all goods are scarce, and we must find some way to obtain them, process them and reach a certain standard of living. If all goods were in unlimited supply we would be living in Wonder Land and economists, businessmen, states… would be superfluous (although, if you analyze it closely, the state is never necessary). We would all have whatever we wished just by thinking it. But this moment has yet to arrive and, therefore, we have to work and exert ourselves to get what we want because no one is going to give it to us. And if there is really someone who systematically offers us what we want for free, as some might think the state does, this means there is another group of people who are slaves and we are living off their production. Such a system denies freedom and openly proclaims slavery.  

 

This is what the former Communist countries intended, and this is what the current welfare state is doing. It enslaves a majority to arbitrarily distribute their production among a minority. This system not only breaches good ethics (and this, contrary to morality, is objective) but it is a system that tends to spread poverty; it creates economic cycles, inflation and dependency on the tyrant through subsidies and forced rights.    

 

Selfishness and capitalism are two concepts with nothing in common. Capitalism is the system for prolonging our lives, assuring we receive an education (a bad education if the state manages it), making it possible for us to get dressed each day and even afford luxuries like televisions, tourism, cars…