Word: capitalists
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...capitalist market system's enduring strengths is precisely its reliance on the profit motive which, like it or not, is a powerful human drive. To many idealists the primacy of the profit motive has long seemed to be a sanctification of selfishness that produces a brutalizing, beggar-thy-neighbor society. Victorian Moralist John Ruskin denounced "the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods...
Profits and other incentives are indispensable to any economic progress. A product or service that is sold for exactly the cost of producing it yields no margin to raise wages, buy new machinery or pursue research leading to new products. Only profits can finance that?whether in a capitalist or a socialist society...
...shortages of goods, lengthy queues in stores, years-long waits for apartments. In order to spur initiative, most Communist countries also have huge and growing differences in real income (and perquisites) between commissar and collective farmer. Nikita Khrushchev once replied to a charge that the Soviet Union was going capitalist: "Call it what you will, incentives are the only way to make people work harder...
More important, capitalism's superior productivity is not solely a matter of electric toothbrushes and throwaway soft-drink bottles: the system also does better at filling basic human needs like food. Farmers in the capitalist U.S., Canada and Australia grow enough not only to feed their own peoples but also to export huge surpluses. In contrast, the Soviet Union?although 30% of its workers labor on its vast farmlands?has to import food. So does India, which permits private farming but insists out of socialist principle that the produce be sold at unrealistically low prices...
...freedom of capitalist society at its best must be prized above all. True, some dictatorships are capitalist because most of the economy is privately owned. Still, the major capitalist nations all have popularly elected governments that guard the right of free speech and assembly. Capitalism demands, by definition, that the individual be free within broad limits to spend and invest his money any way he pleases, to own private property and to enter any business or profession that attracts him. The state that grants those significant