Who Will Defend Liberty?

It is not fair to expect producers and business people to be on the frontline in defending the right to keep the fruits of their labour for this reason.Producers and businessmen spend all their time pursuing their goals and objectives and do not necessarily have the tools and knowledge to argue philosophically against the State's predatory and illegitimate claims on their productive labour through taxation.Just because someone is a very sucessful businessman does not mean he or she will be able or willing to articulate a coherent defence of property rights from an anti taxation position.That takes an acquisition of knowledge and great familiarity with the arguments against egalitarianism and this is not something necessarily the business world is cognizant of, familiar with or equipped to articulate.Businessmen are not ipso facto qualified to give an intellectual defence of freedom.That is the job for intellectuals and activists,writers,bloggers,indeed anyone who is prepared to enter the fray and campaign for liberty.It would be nice if they were as their contribution to the battle would have extra ballast and weight simply because they would be speaking from a position of direct knowledge and experience of the productive wealth acquisition principle but we cannot expect them to be experts in the defence thereof.The greatest defenders of liberty have been profesional writers and thinkers, not entrepreneurs.This is because writing is a profession in itself and a comletely different discipline from trade and business and an ability in one does not necessarily imply and ability in the other.The downside of this reality is that such intellectual defenders of liberty can be dismissed as mere armchair theorists and ivory tower intellectuals although the Left are quite happy to quote verse and chapter from the quitessential armchair theorist Marx who apparently never set foot inside a factory and spent most of his life in the British library! In his defence at least the latter did not rely on State handouts but instead the patient financial assistance of Engels albeit with rich irony with money sourced from the Capitalist system he sought to destroy, but I digress.

None of the above however is to excuse the craven capitulation of the business class to the anti capitalist sentiment abroad,the grovelling apologetic defence of Capitalism,the half hearted support of it, the damning it with faint praise, the obscene defence of it on altruistic grounds of all things.If business men cannot defend Capitalism properly they would do better to say nothing at all.

Until I understood the above regarding defence of Capitalism as a job for profesional writers and thinkers etc I was prone to get very annoyed with the so-called business community but I think I maligned them albeit unwittingly here.The one group of people I will not forgive however and who deserve the greates obloquoy is the so- called defenders of Capitalism ie the Conservatives.They have done more to betray our liberty and freedom in the last 200 years than any other group including the Socialists and the Labour Party.Their crime is unforgiveable because it is their job for which are paid out of the public purse to defend our freedoms and they have done more to destroy them as I say than any other group, political orgnisation and movement throughout history.Why do I say this? Well everyone knows the Socialists hate freedom and liberty and Capitalism and they only pretend to favour it if pushed but the Conservatives are supposed to be the defenders of Capitalism and their betrayal of it is so complete,absolute,comprehensive and total that no one could possibly claim that it is accidental or caused by some misunderstandng of the principles of Capitalism.It is deliberate and intentional.No mistake over such a wide span of generations and time could possibly be accidental.They know exactly what they are doing.It is systematic and conscious.To vote for them after such knowledge is to participate in one's own destruction and is an act of self immolation.

Here to interject a small but not insignificant point.I do not seek to decry intellectuals but only to point out that at least inthe UK there is a deep seated distrust of them particularly from the Right. The writer Anthony Burgess used to decry British mistrust of intellectuals and I know it has a long history but more recent times and events have given it momentum and a patina of justification.Conservatives sometimes appear militantly anti intellectual and I think this is because of recent history re intellectuals and how it lead to the bloodbaths of the 20th century via Communism and Socialism and Fascism which of course are all variants of collectivism as much as the Left seeks to distance itself from Fascism and purports to be its greatest enemy.Hitler lest anyone needs reminding called his party National Socialist.How the Left resent this being pointed out to them which is the very reason why it should be,regularly!So because of this lamentable record of intellectuals siding with totalitarian concepts the Right Conservatives wrongly concluded that they should abandon the field of intellectualism entirely which has only led to the Left by default, holding complete hegemony over it in all our institutions of learning and media.But the point is this,intellectual promulgation of ideas is work,productive activity if it takes the form of books written and sold,dvd broadcast and diseminated etc.Intellectual property is as valid as any other and should not be decried or apoloogised for.It is the food and ammuniton for the public and as such is essential.

So to conclude who should we go to for an unbreached intellectual philosophical comprehensive defence of liberty and Capitalism? There is only one writer I could in all honesty recommend and that is Ayn Rand.I am very familiar with her writings but would not in any way pretend to be in the same stratosphere as her in any way shape or form and and consider myself as nothing more than a pedestrian student of her work.There may be other defenders but I have never come across them.Ludvig von mises has given a partial defence of Capitalism.Frederik Basiat is a brilliant essayist and satirist of collectivist thinking but for a complete,closed universalist philosophical system comprehensively supported by rational argument no one has come close to Ayn Rand.It is to her writings alone I would direct any students of Capitalism.Even if afterwards people choose to dismiss her arguments they cannot really argue agsinst Capitalism without first familiarising themselves with its most brilliant and uncompromising defender.( please forgive appalling grammatical and spelling errors,they will be corrected in due course, or at least those I identify!)