The chilling photo of a hooded man cold-bloodedly executing a health-insurance CEO on a busy New York City street should make any decent person pause and reflect. Anyone who even glimpses the role of social cooperation in making life better and longer felt sickened, or should have. Nothing can justify what the perpetrator did. That so many people see him as a vengeful hero acting in defense of the downtrodden is appalling. One can only hope they will soon come to their senses.
At the risk of taking our eye off the crime, it's worth pointing out that all departures from the market economy—laissez-faire capitalism—are steps toward social disintegration. That infamous, unsurpassingly ugly photo is the perfect image of anti-cooperation, anti-capitalism, and anti-human welfare.
The choice we face is between social cooperation and social disintegration. No person of goodwill harbors doubt about the right choice. The question is how to achieve social cooperation: the state, that is, aggressive force, or the market. The theoretical and historical evidence is unmistakable: the market economy is unequivocally the only way to achieve maximum social cooperation. The state destroys social cooperation.
The widely held belief that social cooperation through the market will not work with health care is balderdash for which no one has adduced evidence. Where markets are left significantly unmolested by politicians and bureaucrats, it achieves reasonable prices and supplies and—this is important—virtually universal coverage. Even those we call poor in this society have refrigerators, HVACs, automobiles, microwave ovens, mobile phones, flat-screen TVs, and so on. Why not affordable universal health services, including insurance?
The reason is that variously motivated politicians and bureaucrats—urged on by "Baptists and bootleggers"—have for over a hundred years tried to combine insurance and welfare in one system, despite their incompatibilities. When that happens, socially harmful results follow; perverse incentives proliferate. Government measures have suppressed supply and boosted demand, a volatile combination. Falsely proclaiming that health care is a right matter not a whit. That the resulting Rube Goldberg "system" of partly spontaneous disorder works as well as it does is a tribute to what's left of the entrepreneurial market and the profit motive. A little market goes a long way. (As they used to say about the Timex watch: 'It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.")
However, the distortions caused by interference with the practice of medicine and the provision of medical insurance have eroded social cooperation, imposed hardship, and created animosity. For that reason alone we need free markets for those services and products
Ludwig von Mises, the premier advocate of full classical liberalism in the 20th century, spent his life demonstrating the indispensability of private property and free trade—capitalism—to social cooperation. He almost titled his economics treatise, Human Action (1949), "Social Cooperation."
The social cooperation of the market economy is often used interchangeably with the term individualism. Isn't that a paradox? Mises resolved the paradox:
Individual man is born into a socially organized environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is--logically or historically--antecedent to the individual. In every other sense this dictum is either empty or nonsensical. The individual lives and acts within society. But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort. It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men. It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals. To speak of a society’s autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.
The questions whether society or the individual is to be considered as the ultimate end, and whether the interests of society should be subordinated to those of the individuals or the interests of the individuals to those of society are fruitless. Action is always action of individual men....
The postliberals of "left" and "right"—the illiberals—who fret that in the market all relationships are reduced to cash get it wrong:
Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man’s most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.
Then what are the agents of social relationships?
The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.
So we have the division of labor, increased productivity, and trade to thank for civilization. The postliberals are wrong. Very wrong. We should yearn for neither the Rousseauian state of nature nor the Hobbesian Leviathan. Mises:
Man appeared on the scene of earthly events as a social being. The isolated asocial man is a fictitious construction....
The idea that anybody would have fared better under an asocial state of mankind and is wronged by the very existence of society is absurd. Thanks to the higher productivity of social cooperation the human species has multiplied far beyond the margin of subsistence offered by the conditions prevailing in ages with a rudimentary degree of the division of labor. Each man enjoys a standard of living much higher than that of his savage ancestors. The natural condition of man is extreme poverty and insecurity. It is romantic nonsense to lament the passing of the happy days of primitive barbarism.
Mises laid out more clearly than anyone how the market process creates general prosperity. He wrote:
The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybody’s actions aim at the satisfaction of other people’s needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens. Everybody, on the other hand, is served by his fellow citizens. Everybody is both a means and an end in himself, an ultimate end for himself and a means to other people in their endeavors to attain their own ends.
This system is steered by the market. The market directs the individual’s activities into those channels in which he best serves the wants of his fellow men. There is in the operation of the market no compulsion and coercion....
The market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation.
The dislocations and distortions we rightly criticize in the medical sector are produced by government interference with this market process rooted in social cooperation. But people widely attribute those distortions to the market itself. How could they make such a fundamental mistake? Part of the reason is that private property in the profit-and-loss environment has not been completely eradicated. Rather, it has been denatured; the shell has been maintained, but its essence has been changed almost beyond recognition. The politicians' and bureaucrats' fingerprints are over it.
Mises noted:
In searching for remedies against poverty, inequality, and insecurity, [the present-day welfare propagandists] come step by step to endorse all the fallacies of the older schools of socialism and interventionism. They become more and more entangled in contradictions and absurdities. Finally they cannot help catching at the straw at which all earlier “unorthodox” reformers tried to grasp—the superior wisdom of perfect rulers. Their last word is always state, government, society, or other cleverly designed synonyms for the superhuman dictator.
The welfare school ... [has] published many thousands of volumes stuffed with punctiliously documented information about unsatisfactory conditions. In their opinion the collected materials clearly illustrate the shortcomings of capitalism. In truth they merely illustrate the fact that human wants are practically unlimited and that there is an immense field open for further improvements. They certainly do not prove any of the statements of the welfare doctrine.
In Mises's day the socialialists and interventionists promised that their alternatives to the market would outperform a social system based on private property. However, that promise changed when the anti-market forces could no longer evade statism's obvious inferiority in delivering the goods. Undeterred, they discovered the "age of limits" and criticized "consumerism." Now statism's superiority lies in its lack of productivity. But as I say, Mises had to contend with the opposite claims.
There is no need to tell us that an ampler supply of various commodities would be welcome to all people. The question is whether there is any means of achieving a greater supply other than by increasing the productivity of human effort by the investment of additional capital. All the babble of the welfare propagandists aims only at one end, namely, obscuring this point, the point that alone matters.,,, Thus they are the harbingers of economic retrogression, preaching a philosophy of decay and social disintegration. A society arranged according to their precepts may appear to some people as fair from the point of view of an arbitrary standard of social justice. But it will certainly be a society of progressing poverty for all its members....
The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures but at the same time improved the people’s standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggest that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. [If you seek his monument, look around.]
Our very lives depend on reviving the public's understanding of what the free market has bestowed in so short a time.
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