"What is Capitalism?" by Ayn Rand, List 3

While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane.

The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters.

It represents the recognition of the fact that man is not the property nor the servant of the tribe, that a man works in order to support his own life—as, by his nature, he must—that he has to be guided by his own rational self-interest, and if he wants to trade with others, he cannot expect sacrificial victims, i.e., he cannot expect to receive values without trading commensurate values in return.

Progress cannot be achieved by forced privations, by squeezing a “social surplus” out of starving victims.

Industrialization is not a static goal; it is a dynamic process with a rapid rate of obsolescence.

To hold that view in an industrial society— where individual achievements are a matter of public record—is so crass an evasion that even to give it the benefit of the doubt is an obscenity.

As a resurgent tide of mysticism engulfed philosophy in the nineteenth century, capitalism was left in an intellectual vacuum, its lifeline cut.

Its alleged defenders regarded it as compatible with government controls (i.e., government interference into the economy), ignoring the meaning and implications of the concept of laissez-faire.

Criticism usually proceeds either from moral or cultural disapproval of certain features of the capitalist system, or from the shortrun vicissitudes (crises and depressions) with which long-run improvement is interspersed.

Its materialistic utilitarianism, its naive confidence in progress of a certain type, its actual achievements in the field of pure and applied science, the temper of its artistic creations, may all be traced to the spirit of rationalism that emanates from the businessman’s office.

In underdeveloped economies the difficult task of statesmanship is to get under way a cumulative process of economic development, for once a certain momentum is attained, further advances appear to follow more or less automatically.

The criterion for allocation between the public and private sectors is formally the same as in any other resource allocation, namely that the community should receive equal satisfaction from a marginal increment of resources used in the public and private spheres....

First, all products and income accrue [?] initially to the private sector while resources reach the public sector through the painful process of taxation.

The corollary is that many public needs are neglected because these superficial private wants, artificially generated, compete successfully for the same resources.

At the end of World War II, Soviet Russia’s enemies claimed that thirty million people were doing forced labor in Soviet concentration camps (and were dying of planned malnutrition, human lives being cheaper than food); Soviet Russia’s apologists admit to the figure of twelve million people.