Is Capitalism an Immoral Economic System?

Achim Weitzel ----- A system based on the freedom to produce and trade respects people's right to pursue their happiness. To that extent, it is a moral economic system. A system based on slavery, where you are forced to produce for the welfare of other people, does not seem to me a moral economic system. Both systems have existed througout history and exist today in different parts of the world to varying degrees.

RVP Regional Vice President ---------- I was limiting the question to morality in economics. Bashing liberals for their civil liberties is outside the scope of the question. Morality is a code of values based on the pursuit of happiness in different aspects of human life, such as economic success, sexual gratification, freedom to act according to one's will without requiring the sacrifice of other people's life or prohibiting the pursuit of their happiness if they do not harm anyone.

spicymus ------- True, selfishness is in the nature of all living organisms. Without it, they would not be interested in maintaing themselves alive. Humans have the choice to be selfish by violating other people's right to their freedom, property and happiness or to be selfish by pursuing their rational self-interest without harming or cheating anyone.

A X ------ Morality is a principle for living. To be moral means to act in one's self-interest without requiring the sacrifice of life, property or liberty of others. Economic inequality is a consequence of a specific social context, not necessarily due to some people wanting to enslave others. In a political system of dictatorship, where no one may act without the permission of a dictator, economic inequality may be due in great part to immoral, unjust treatment of people. Since not evryone possesses by nature or desire the ability to achieve the same economic success as everyone else, in a free society economic inequality is not due to immoral treatment on the part of anybody. On the other hand, forcing someone to act against their will by law to pay for the needs and desires of others is definitely a form of enslavement and therefore an immoral treatment by means of using physical force. It compels one to act against one's own rational self-interest or judgment.

Bored Gremlin -------- "If you believe in merit-based outcomes, capitalism is moral. If you believe in equal income, it is not." Merit-based outcome means that talent and effort should be rewarded and laziness should not. The question of morality rests only on the principle of forcing someone to reward talent or laziness AGAINST their will. If you want to reward laziness, no one should have the right to stop you. Equal income is immoral because there is no such thing in nature that produces equal income. If you are talented, can sing like Pavarotti or can invent the next ipod, you probably will be rewarded more than if your talent amounts to driving a cab. But there is no moral principle whatsoever in the idea that either Pavarotti or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs should be forced by law to give everyone else in society enough from their earnings so that everyone else has equal income, reagrdless of their natural talents and if or what they decide to do and produce with th

with their talents.

Mich Ravera --------- Capitalism is an economic-political system. It functions under a specific political system with a Constitution which protects individual rights. If politics interfere with favoritisms and fails to protect individual rights to trade and produce freely, capitalism cannot function. Under capitalism, producers and consumers do not "do things to their mutual benefit or detriment" they exchange voluntarily only to their mutual advantage. Nobody is forced to exchange one value at his detriment. When that happens, it is not capitalism that legislates, but political abuse of power. To correct that, we have to look at what kind of Constitution permits political abuse and makes capitalism unable to operate by the law of supply and demand.

Neil ----------- Only where a government permits the violation of individual rights one person can prifit by exploting others. Maximum profit can be obtained morally where millions of people voluntarily purchase a product that someone can sell at the lowest competitive price.

Achim Weitzel ----- I see there are others who feel the way you do, but I think that an economic system is defined as the method chosen by people or imposed on people for the purpose of creating the maximum prosperity for all those who belong to a society. In North Korea, for example, the dictator did not choose capitalism or free enterprise as an economic system. So people are forced to interact with each other according to different rules, according to collective rules imposed by some authority with political power.

Any collective system of economics cannot be moral, because it requires the denial of individual rights. The individual is forced to live for the sake of society, whatever the goals of political power may be. Capitalism is the only moral system that can exist where people can exercise their individual rights and where individual rights are protected by law. It is not the system of forced redestribution of wealth by someone's arbitrary whim in order to achieve economic equality (poverty) for people, except for those in power.