Not that style alone reveals much, of course, but one might wonder why Socialism is written with a capital letter, and capitalism is not. This stylistic distinction tempts one to think of the parallelism in writing God with a capital letter, but the devil in lower case.
There’s something charmingly quaint about the leftists’ continuing attack on capitalism, which is a type of economic order that, if it ever existed at all in this country, has not existed in recognizable form since the 1920s — in a more plausible assessment, not since the years before World War I. Yet the so-called progressives never tire of beating the long-dead horse of capitalism. Are they so ideologically blind that they cannot see how governments at every level have intervened and intervened again until they have displaced or distorted every element of the economic order that might once have contributed to its capitalist character? We live, as F. A. Hayek observed as long ago as 1935, not in a market system, but in a situation of interventionist chaos, where virtually every market is so hog-tied by regulations, laws, and taxes or so artificially pumped up by subsidies, regulatory advantages, and tax loopholes that virtually nothing remains pure and unsullied by the filthy hand of the interventionist state. We inhabit, as we have for nearly a century, a blessed “mixed economy.” What’s this ongoing nonsense about the failure of capitalism? Before anything can fail, it must first exist.
