One of the most popular misimpressions or smear campaign tactics directed against free markets or laissez faire capitalism is that such a system promotes a political order known as plutocracy-or the rule of the wealthy.
This idea either lacks the comprehensive understanding of capitalism or simply operates on the premises of deliberate equivocation (propaganda).
The Consumer Reigns In A Laissez Faire System
In the laissez faire political economic order, it is the consumer that ALWAYS reigns supreme.
Consumers ultimately determine who to reward (by profits) and who to punish (by losses). Thus, the wealthy are those entrepreneurs who manage to continually satisfy the ever dynamic desires of consumers.
As the great Ludwig von Mises wrote, (bold highlights mine)
In the capitalistic society, men become rich — directly as the producer of consumers' goods, or indirectly as the producer of raw materials and semiproduced factors of production — by serving consumers in large numbers. This means that men who become rich in the capitalistic society are serving the people. The capitalistic market economy is a democracy in which every penny constitutes a vote. The wealth of the successful businessman is the result of a consumer plebiscite. Wealth, once acquired, can be preserved only by those who keep on earning it anew by satisfying the wishes of consumers.
In addition, market dominance is neither guaranteed nor in a state of permanence because consumer desires always changes.
Importantly, the highly competitive nature of markets impels entrepreneurs to attain excellence by exploiting windows of entrepreneurial opportunities.
As Professor Israel M. Kirzner writes, (bold highlights mine, italics Prof Kirzner)
What makes possible the entrepreneurially driven process of equilibration is active market competition. It is only the possibility of unrestricted entrepreneurial entry which permits more alert entrepreneurs to deploy their superior vision of the future in order to correct the misallocations of resources reflected in the false prices which characterize disequilibrium. It is the continual threat of such entry which tends to keep incumbent entrepreneurs alert and on their toes.
A good example of such process can be seen from how Apple, the technology behemoth company, has attained its present dominance.
Apple’s Sphere of Influence From Minyanville.com
Apple’s success wasn’t granted by fiat orders from political leaders but from its numerous attempts to satisfy consumer demands via competition derived innovative consumer friendly technology devices.
The above is an example of one of the many failed Apple products (chart and the rest of the story from Minyanville). In other words, Apple’s recent string of successes came at the cost of her previous failed experiences or experiments.
I have recently noted on how Mattel, makers of the famous Barbie dolls, has closed shop in China for failing to adapt to local tastes and how Philippine conglomerate Jollibee has captured the largest market share in the Philippine fast food industry by toppling US based counterpart McDonald’s by ingenously configuring her products to the palate of Filipino consumers.
The point is—the political economic order of the rule of the wealthy (plutocracy) would NOT sustainably persist or would unlikely occur under a pure laissez faire system.
State And Crony Capitalism Equals Plutocracy
The apologists for statism, who see Plutocracy as the main source for inequality, hardly realize that for the wealthy to politically sustain its dominance means to adapt ANTI-COMPETITIVE measures by co-opting with the political leaders.
Writes Art Carden (bold highlights mine)
Bourgeois riches come from customer service. Aristocratic riches are expropriated. Aristocracy rests on intrinsic value whereas capitalism rests on the exchange of value for value.
Libertarian William Graham Sumner wrote, (bold highlights mine)
[M]ilitarism, expansion and imperialism will all favor plutocracy. In the first place, war and expansion will favor jobbery, both in the dependencies and at home. In the second place, they will take away the attention of the people from what the plutocrats are doing. In the third place, they will cause large expenditures of the people's money, the return for which will not go into the treasury, but into the hands of a few schemers. In the fourth place, they will call for a large public debt and taxes, and these things especially tend to make men unequal, because any social burdens bear more heavily on the weak than on the strong, and so make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. ("Conquest of the United States by Spain.")
And it has not been different here in Southeast Asia, Joe Studwell writes, (as I earlier quoted here)
Centralized governments that under-regulate competition (in the sense of failing to ensure its presence) and over-regulate market access (through restrictive licensing and non-competitive tendering) guarantee that merchant capitalists-or asset trader, to use a more pejorative term-will rise to the top by arbitraging economic inefficiencies created by politicians. The trend is reinforced in South-east Asia by the widespread presence of what could be called as ‘manipulated democracy’, either in the guise of predetermined winner democracy (Singapore, Malaysia, Suharto’s Indonesia) or else in the scenario where business interest gain so close a control of the political system that they are unaffected by the changes of government that do occur (as in Thailand and the Philippines). In both instances politicians spend huge sums to maintain a grip on power that has some semblance of legitimacy. This can only be financed by through direct political ownership of big business or more usually, contributions from nominally independent big business that is beholden to politicians. Whichever, the mechanism creates a not entirely unhappy dependence of elites between politicians and tycoons.”
If Confucius once said that ‘give the man a fish you feed him for the day, teach him to fish and you feed him the rest of his life’.
From a political standpoint, libertarians and classical liberals advocates on the method that teaches the man how to fish, so as to make him productive to the society.
Whereas for statists, who along with politicians, will naively insist on feeding the man for the day (moment), by picking on someone else's pocket, supported by a legalized coercive framework that are enabled or facilitated by a politically constructed paper money system, which from the account of the entire history of man’s attempt to produce political nirvana has always failed.
Yet such accounts for exactly the Anatomy of Plutocracy.
Any political economic order which depends on political privileges or distribution of resources—endowments, protectionism, subsidies, bailouts, behest loans, economic concessions et. al. represents NOT a laissez faire system but a political system known as STATE CAPITALISM or CORPORATISM or CRONY CAPITALISM. The important difference is that consumers in a laissez faire system represents as real power, whereas politicians signify as the most powerful agents in the state capitalist order.
In today’s setting, the cooptation of the banking cartel-military industrial complex-green industrial-government labor union-welfare state-central banking system (in the US or elsewhere) are representative of PLUTOCRACY IN ACTION!
As the great Milton Friedman said in this lecture,
A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty, will not end up with equality but will end up with a closer approach to equality.
Bottom line: Statism or government interventionism, which enables or sustains a political economic order of plutocracy, is what engenders social inequality. The more societies politically organize herself towards attaining social equality, the more inequality gets amplified.
Here, noble intentions and economic reality are separated.
