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free trade & free markets ideological culture individual achievement

A True Revolutionary

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The key to success in business? Profitably serve as wide a customer base as possible. Mass production is the lynchpin. And it’s also at the heart of why many intellectuals hate capitalism: Serving the mass of mankind is “beneath” them. They have a higher calling. They serve Justice, or The Truth. Or, say, Beauty.

This curious by-product of capitalism is what Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises called “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality”: The tendency of intellectuals to react against the very instrument that serves the common man even while they ballyhoo the “cause” of the common man.

Mises and others focused on intellectuals’ envy as the reason for their strange, seemingly inexplicable “turn.” Why bite the hand that feeds so many? Because that hand doesn’t reward intellectuals enough!

F.A. Hayek added another reason: Incomprehension. How markets work is beyond the designs of any single mind. Intellectuals tend to be prejudiced in favor of singular minds. Theirs, at least.

The great revelation at the end of the last century followed from that: Command-and-control societies must fail. Regardless, though, “planning” does happen in a free society. Piecemeal. You plan. I plan. And entrepreneurs plan to serve us both.

And entrepreneurs of genius successfully serve millions, make a lot of money for all concerned, and find new ways to make life easier, more enjoyable.

Steve Jobs was such a man. He died yesterday, age 56. As head of Apple and Pixar, he changed society by serving the masses.

And even intellectuals approved.

A revolutionary, indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

4 replies on “A True Revolutionary”

Wonderful! I have been lurking through your RSS feed and have to say that when tou are correct, you are thoroughly correct. And you are easier to read than Mises, though maybe not Hayek. Thanks.

Intellectuals not only bite the hand, they seek destruction of the very thing that made themselves possible. Only the surplusses and excesses of capitalism make possible the collecting together of institutions of higher learning such that their own radical thought is even possible. Other more “ideal” societies do not tolerate deviation from the status quo and such free thought.
The intellectual’s attempt then at destruction of the capitalism that birthed them ensures that future generations will not ever have a chance to challenge them. They are busily pulling up the ladders lest any follow and question their fallaciousness.
Rare to the point of non-existance for any great thinkers to have time in the course of the dull grind of making a living under socialism to work through the great questions and then be able to disseminate those ideas.

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