When contrasted with a dream of perfection, capitalism was manifestly at a disadvantage. But with the advent of socialist economies (Communist Russia, China) and the semisocialist, or “mixed,” systems of Scandinavia, Britain, and New Deal America (to say nothing of the “national” socialisms of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy), capitalism no longer requires apologists. Under any comparative audit of systems it comes out very well indeed. It may have its islands of poverty, its “contractions,” but it does not murder people as a matter of policy or shut them up in concentration camps. It does not force men and women to accept uncongenial occupations or goods that are subjected to the approval of a small “planning” bureaucracy. It does not reduce life to a continual round of abject permissiveness.
-John Chamberlain (’s 1959 book, The Roots of Capitalism:
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
