In the contemporary world, where left-wing attitudes are regarded as normative, it is a given that capitalism, with its free market and profit motive, emanates from and creates selfishness, while socialism, the welfare state, and the “social compact” as it is increasingly referred to, emanate from and produce selflessness.
The opposite is the truth.
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Whatever its intentions, the entitlement state produces far more selfish people — and therefore a far more selfish society — than a free-market economy. And we have little evidence that this widespread selfishness can be undone once it catches on.
Here’s an illustration: Last year, President Obama addressed a large audience of college students on the subject of health care. At one point in his speech, he announced that the students will now be able to remain on their parents’ health-insurance plan until age 26. I do not ever recall hearing a louder, more thunderous, and more sustained applause than I did then. I do not believe that if the president had announced that a cure for cancer had been discovered that the applause would have been louder or longer.
It is depressing to listen to that applause. To be told that one can be dependent on one’s parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.
Throughout American history, the natural — or at least hoped-for — inclination of a young person was to become a mature adult, independent of Mom and Dad, and to become a grown-up. But in the welfare state, this is no longer the case.
In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.
The welfare state enables — and thereby produces — people whose preoccupations become more and more self-centered as time goes on:
How many benefits will I receive from the state?
How much will the state pay for my education?
How much will the state pay for my health care and retirement?
What is the youngest age at which I can retire?
How much vacation time can I get each year?
How many days can I call in sick and get paid?
How many months can I claim paternity- or maternity-care money?
The list gets longer with each election of a left-wing party. And each entitlement becomes a “right,” as the Left transforms entitlements into the language of “rights” as quickly as possible.
What handouts do, and what the transformation of handouts into rights does, is create a citizenry that increasingly lacks the most important character trait — gratitude. Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. That is why we teach our children to say “thank you.” But the welfare state undoes that. One does not express thanks for a right. So, instead of “thank you,” the citizen of the welfare state is taught to say, “What more can I get?”
Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.
They succeed in part because demonizing conservatives and their values is a left-wing art. But the truth is that capitalism and the free market produce less selfish people. Teaching people to work hard and take care of themselves (and others) produces a less, not a more, selfish citizen.
Capitalism teaches people to work harder; the welfare state teaches people to want harder. Which is better?
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.
Currently, the cost of health care is rising at a much higher rate than inflation. Even if we were to implement your beloved single payer, at a certain point we can not afford to pay for every new treatment and technology that comes along if we want to have any semblance of an economy. If you dont have insurance you should check out "Penny Health Insurance" for information on how to get one.
Thomas Sowell wrote an excellent piece on the tendency of socialism to promote selfishness and capitalism to promote competition.
I don't remember which book it was in.
Good piece. You did not mention Adam Smith's key insight, that to become rich one basically must find a new, innovative way of meeting other people's needs. My progressive friends just can't understand that capitalism is not a zero sum game.
That was possibly the most incoherent argument I have read on this site. Once an individual has been awarded certain benefits such as those listed above, whether by law or by employer benefit plan, they should know the limits and how best to utilize these benefits. Mr. Prager lists all the above benefits as some sort of moral affront whereas I find most people view most of them as the largess of civilized society; a tangible benefit from moving away from simple subsistence.
Additionally, Mr. Prager offers no counter evidence as to how capitalsim or the free market makes people less selfish. Is exploiting Chinese peasants to assemble Ipads in horrific working conditions "less selfish?" I guess it is for the peasants who gladly take this work to feed their families. Maybe it's all just a matter of perspective...
SmithersJones I am afraid you completely missed the point. First, China isn't a capitalist society by any stretch of the imagination so your analogy there is invalid. But that is the least worrisome of your points. You assert that people should know how to self-regulate the benefits they receive. How so? Because you see, we have reached a point where a large portion of the public has discovered that they can vote themselves benefits. Recent events - think Obamacare, Wisconsin, etc - show us that a big chunk of the electorate as no intention of self-regulating. Think about it. If 4 wolves, 3 chickens, and a turtle vote on dinner who wins out?
The point of the article is that under a capitalist system individuals are more empowered to improve their own lot in life and to provide charity to those in need. By contrast, socialist systems remove both of these from the equation. Upward mobility is limited by excessive state regulation and taxation. Charity is rendered less attractive when there is a state apparatus present allegedly to remedy poverty. I use the term "allegedly" deliberately because with nearly every socialist experiment - The Great Society comes to mind - the poor remain poor. Under socialism they must for they are the constituency group the socialist system depends upon for support. In the US this is evidenced by the long record of Democrat Party promises made to the poor and the woefully short list of successes Democrats can point to as a result. Appalachia and the inner city are as poor today (if not poorer) as they were when Lyndon Johnson begat a massive socialist mechanism that was sold to the public as a means to eliminate poverty. Today Democrats make the same promises to the same constituency groups on the basis of giving that group stuff.
In short it comes down to the classic paradigm about a man and a fish. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. That's socialism. Teach a man to fish and you've fed him for a lifetime. That's capitalism. The distinction could not be clearer. I'm sorry you don't seem to comprehend such a fundamental and important point.
P/S: There are volumes of data available revealing that capitalist systems result in more charitable giving and less poverty than socialist systems.
I don't think that DP's article was intended as a thorough argument, but rather as an opinion in limited space. I opine:
1. Let us distinguish selfishness from narcissism.
2. Let us note that the foundation of American capitalism is land taken from its natives, or if you prefer simply colonized because the natives weren't doing much with it. Either way you look at it, the foundation is something (land) that was not produced by work, and not earned. Its acquisition and privatization was selfish, in the most extreme sense of that word, and the Homestead Act was the world's greatest entitlement program since Joshua took Jericho.
3. Let us distinguish working hard from creating hard, and from "being useful" hard. Anyone can work hard. I frequently encounter aggressive panhandlers who put in more hours and effort, under more adverse conditions, than do office or factory workers. What's to distinguish them from the founders of Facebook, whose product appears to be aggregating the work efforts of other people?
Give me, give me, give me, stomp, stomp, stomp! The left's concept of sharing is like that of my 3 year old son. He will pull something out of my hand and if I resist he yells at me to share. I explain to him that sharing is when YOU choose to give something to someone else, when you take something from a person against their will that is called STEALING. Charity is a voluntary heartfelt act of giving, coercive redistribution of wealth is not charity.
Never_Outraged: C'mon, the Homestead Act took land that was not being used and to which no one claimed ownership, and gave it to people who were required to do something useful with it. Today's entitlement programs take money from people who work for it and transfer it to people who don't. The recipients do nothing to earn the money save voting the right way on election day.
If you can't distinguish between the founders of Facebook and panhandlers, let me explain. The founders of Facebook created a service that people want to use and to whom advertisers wish to sell. Any idiot can be a panhandler. Panhandlers offer nothing in return for what they are given. Supply and demand, you see.
The Indians were free to try and kick the English/French/Spaniards/etc. out of wilderness areas those settlers improved if they wanted to (the same way they settled issues of "property rights" between different tribes). They decided to try in an attempted genocide of the English settlers (King Phillip's War) and lost. This had little to do with capitalism, welfare, or socialism.
Prager has it all backwards. Capitalism is indeed selfish but not in the sense that he and most people understand. Selfishness as defined and explicated by Ayn Rand is the concern for one's own interest. But it does not mean that you do so at the expense of other people. This idea has been propagated by the altruist package-deal that says either you live for others or you live for yourself at the expense of others. This is a false alternative. Rand knew that selfishness requires no sacrifice on either side. Selfishness requires acting in your long-term self interest based upon the requirements of human flourishing. Selfishness is not the brute or looter's code but that of the producer, of the highly moral man. Capitalism is about setting man free from one another to pursue their own interests. This is pure selfishness; selfishness is the real, positive sense of the term.
What I think is interesting that is usually not mentioned is that to succeed in capitalist system you have to think of others. If you do not provide something that others want and need, you will not do well. It doesn't encourage selfishness at all.
When the government takes my money from me by force I am not engaged in an act of largess.
Furthermore, for me to take your money by force and give it to someone else is not largess on my part because I am giving that which was not mine in the first place.
It is extremely easy for Eristic to bribe Peter with Paul's money. BTW, I will always have Peter's vote.
The entire economic behavior of American government, at all levels, since the 1960's seems to have been predicated the premise that you can get something for nothing. The reality is otherwise and the American people are finally beginning to learn the absolutely obvious.
"... aggressive panhandlers who put in more hours and effort, under more adverse conditions, than do office or factory workers. What's to distinguish them from the founders of Facebook, whose product appears to be aggregating the work efforts of other people?"
Wow! Try reading Smith and Ricardo. In their works you will be introduced to the concept of the creation of wealth.
The bum produces no wealth. He merely attempts have some of somebody else's wealth transfered to himself. Society is not one penny richer by this bum's panhandling.
The bum can survive only on the surplus wealth created by others and given to him. He is a parasite and should be scorned.
Read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Also try reading "The Fountainhead" by the same authoress:
“We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.
“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.
“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.
“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.
Great point Michael Caution. I know a person who spends a great deal of energy working with non profits because he does not believe in for profit businesses and is involved in many charities, but then relies on government subsidies to take care of his own family. While his work is noble, I feel like maybe he should put his efforts into the interest of his own family first and foremost. If more families (fathers especially) would focus on the well being of their own families, then perhaps we would all be better off. We have been trained to see selfishness as a negative virtue, but really it is our responsibility to take care of our own families first and foremost.
When I first started in business a very wise man told me, "You can get everything you want by helping others get what they want."
I used to have junior salesmen ask me about how much equipment I sold and how much it must have been. I always to them that I never sold any equipment, ever.
What I did was help a lot of good people solve their problems and in the process some equipment might have changed hands. I never approached (and still do not) a deal thinking solely of just what is in this for me.
@Olivia
The selfless charity/social worker is not a noble ideal that doesn't work in practice. It is an immoral ideal and therefore doesn't work in practice. This exact attitude toward sacrifice is why socialism/communism won't die, b/c ppl still view it as a noble cause that just doesn't work in practice. If you believe that you'll always find ppl saying, "If it's a noble cause then let's be consistent and implement it". And so the whole cycle of history repeats itself.
Charity as a way of life is not a life at all. Charity should only be a very very small aspect in any society (if ppl choose to help) b/c it would be for those who can't take care of themselves. But in the field of ethics charity is only a secondary issue and not it's main focus. Every person's main focus should be on their own lives, making the most of them and that includes taking care of those we value such as our families. The person you mention should take a page from Rand and be selfish about his values and take care of his own family as you say. Live rationally, be selfish! - Michael Caution
"He whom you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster."
Freidrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In other words, screw the state, grow up and grow a pair...
Silver bullet words for the wolves known as lib-progressive redistribute the wealth pray at the altar of the welfare-state bleeding heart candy as* thiefs!!!
I am not an Objectivist, but I think that Ayn Rand best expressed the idea in Mr. Prager's column in the scene in Atlas Shrugged where the old factory worker described the shift in the way men viewed their fellows due to Communism. It jibes very well with what my parents experienced in the Soviet Union.
When I am earning enough to keep my children in clothes and well-fed, I can look to my neighbor and see that his kids are sick. Compassion will lead me to give what I can. But when his kids' medicine means my kids get no shoes this Winter, I begin to hate my fellow man, not love him.
When people's needs govern the distribution of resources, it's a race to bottom that brings out the worst in human nature, not the best.
As usual, Smithers demonstrates that he has no comprehension of any argument that does not support his belief system.
Beyond that, he falls for the idea that hiring anyone for a wage that is less than he personally would accept, is exploitation.
The refutation of that claim has been handled better by many, but I suffice it to point out that nobody is forcing those Indonesians to work in those factories. They choose to of their own free will. When Smithers finds out why people would so choose, then maybe, just maybe, he will finally be on the path to wisdom.
Joanna Weissen: Additionally, to suceed in a capitalist society you must be willing and able to cooperate with others. There is no mechanism to force others to work with you.
Socialism on the other hand is all about force, not cooperation.
