For many people, the collapse of one socialist regime after another in the late 1980s firmly established market capitalism as the superior system. Nevertheless, anti-capitalist resentment – sometimes latent, sometimes expressed openly – not only still persists in some quarters but has gained a lot of ground in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Policy makers, media commentators and intellectuals almost unanimously interpret the crisis as a failure of the market, or of the capitalist system, that can only be resolved by more government intervention.

This book was written as a response to these views and was driven by the worry that we are about to disown the foundations on which our economic prosperity is based. The first edition of this book was published in Germany in 2018 and has been followed by editions in English, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Polish. It has even been translated and published in numerous smaller – formerly socialist – countries such as Georgia and Mongolia. The edition you are now reading has been completely revised and updated in November 2023.

When I first published this book more than five years ago, some critics asked: Is it even necessary to defend capitalism? Is there really anyone in the world today who would seriously want to abolish capitalism? Unfortunately, there can be no doubt: Capitalism is under attack all around the world. Socialists have seized control of the political reins in most Latin American countries – even Chile. China, which had previously achieved such spectacular economic growth as a result of free-market reforms, returned to a policy of “more state and less market” some years ago.

In 2023, the United States posted its worst ranking in the Index of Economic Freedom since the index was first published in 1995. According to the Heritage Foundation, as many as 16 European countries are now economically freer than the United States. But that doesn’t mean everything is great in Europe. On the contrary, the European Union is moving ever faster down the road toward a planned economy. Under the pretext of fighting climate change, the state is increasingly intervening in the economy. What Ludwig von Mises called the “spiral of intervention” is now an observable reality across Europe today.

A modern economy can be organised according to one of two basic principles. In the first scenario, there is no private ownership of land or means of production. Instead, all of these assets are owned by the state. Government agencies in charge of economic planning decide what and how much is manufactured. In the second scenario, the right to private ownership is guaranteed and entrepreneurs operate within a legal framework to manufacture products they believe consumers will want. The prices they are able to charge for their products serve as a measure of the extent to which their assumptions were right – in other words, the extent to which their supply of products was aligned to the consumers’ demand for these products. The first definition describes a socialist system, the second a capitalist one. Throughout this book, the latter term will be used to designate a genuinely free-market economy rather than a watered-down version sometimes defined as ‘social’ or ‘eco-social’ market economy.

In reality, neither of the two systems exists today, or has ever existed, in a pure form. Even in socialist countries such as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or even North Korea, some individuals did or do own private property, while the overarching economic plan has never completely suppressed all elements of the free market. Without these elements, the economies of these countries would have been even more dysfunctional. While prices nominally exist in socialist economies, the function they perform is radically different from their function in capitalist economies. In fact, they more closely resemble taxes, as the economist Weiying Zhang has noted.

In capitalist economies, on the other hand, a degree of both public ownership and regulatory intervention exists, while taxes essentially represent a system of redistribution that takes from the rich and gives to the middle classes and the poor. Sweden in the 1970s is an extreme example of this kind of redistribution, while the UK during the same period makes a sobering case study that shows the negative economic outcomes of disproportionate government intervention and proves that limiting such intervention is crucial to increasing prosperity.

None of the countries presented in this book operate a ‘pure’ form of capitalism. In each case, the important issue is the proportion or balance between regulatory intervention and entrepreneurial freedom. The central argument proposed in this book is that increasing the proportion of capitalist elements in a given economy generally leads to more growth, which increases the well-being of a majority of people living within that economy. China’s development over the past few decades is a case in point.

Plenty of books seek to marshal theory in order to prove that either of the two economic systems is superior to the other. This is not one of them. Rather than approaching its subject from a theoretical angle, this book takes economic history as its starting point. Unlike socialism, capitalism is not a system invented by intellectuals. Instead, it has evolved organically over centuries, much in the same way in which plants and animals have evolved in nature and continue to do without requiring any centralised planning or theorising. Among the economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek’s most important insights is the realisation that the origin of well functioning institutions is to be found “not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful”, with the selection process operating “by imitation of successful institutions and habits.”

The biggest error that unites socialists of various stripes with the men and women running the central banks is the belief that a few designated master planners are better able to determine what the people need than the millions of entrepreneurs, investors and consumers whose individual decisions, when added together, are in fact far superior to those of any governmental planning agency, central bank or other organ of state control.

This is why ‘top-down’ attempts to impose a market-based economy remain largely unsuccessful – although some political incentives are of course needed to make capitalist systems work. A closer look at China will show that its successful transition towards capitalism was substantially due to the ‘bottom-up’ growth and widespread adoption of capitalist economic practices – none of which would have been possible without the top-down tolerance of such practices by political leaders such as Deng Xiaoping. Deng and his fellow reformers were smart enough not to invent a new system based on ideals. Instead, they did two things: firstly, rather than attempting to ban or rein in spontaneous developments across that vast country, they allowed them to evolve organically. Secondly, they took a hard look at many other countries to see what was working and what wasn’t – and then implemented this knowledge at home.

In this book, I take a similar approach: looking at what has worked and what hasn’t. I compare countries that invite comparison because they have a lot of shared history and culture: North and South Korea, the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany, Venezuela and Chile. The book also shows how the advance of capitalism and the retreat of socialism turned China from a dirt-poor country, where tens of millions of people starved to death just over 60 years ago, into the world’s largest export nation, where famine has been eradicated.

While left-wing critics of capitalism and globalisation blame capitalism for causing hunger and poverty in various parts of the world, the recent history of the African continent furnishes plenty of examples to prove that the opposite is true: capitalism is not the problem but the solution. Capitalism has proved more effective at fighting poverty than financial aid. Studies show that the more market-oriented developing countries have a poverty rate of only 8.1%, compared to 31.2% in developing countries without a free market.

In general, more state intervention means lower, in some cases even negative, growth rates, while the recent economic history of the US and the UK provides compelling evidence that more capitalism leads to a faster increase in prosperity for the majority of people. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – two political leaders who firmly believed in the benefits of the free market – introduced reforms that reduced the influence of the state on the economy and significantly improved economic prospects in both countries. As the example of Sweden – discussed in Chapter 7 – shows, welfare-state programs can sometimes stifle economic growth and need to be curtailed.

Over the past 70 years, these real-world experiments have consistently produced similar outcomes – overwhelming evidence pointing to the conclusion that more capitalism means greater prosperity. Still, in many quarters a remarkable reluctance or inability to learn from these outcomes persists. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said: “But what experience and history teach is this, – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

Even if his verdict may be too harsh, it does seem that a majority of people are unable to abstract and draw general conclusions from (some) historical experience. Despite the numerous examples of more capitalist economic policies leading to greater prosperity (some of which are discussed in this book, while others, such as India, Vietnam and Poland are not) and the failure of every single variant of socialism that has ever been tested under real-world conditions, many people still refuse to learn the obvious lesson.

Following the collapse of the majority of socialist systems in the early 1990s, attempts to implement socialist ideals are still happening in various parts of the world in the vain hope that ‘this time’ the outcome will be different – most recently in Venezuela. Just as they were captivated by similar earlier experiments, many intellectuals across the Western world were enthralled by Hugo Chávez’s attempt to take socialism into the 21st century. As with previous large-scale socialist experiments, the consequences were disastrous, as shown in Chapter 6.

Even in the US today, many young people cling to the ‘socialist’ dream – although the system they have in mind is an idealised and misguided version of Scandinavian-style socialism rather than Soviet-era communism. However, this book demonstrates that this variant, too, has been thoroughly discredited by its comprehensive failure in the 1970s and 1980s (Chapter 7).

I am not too worried about large-scale nationalisation of assets and enterprises sweeping across industrialised Western nations any time soon. Rather, what concerns me is the far greater and more immediate danger of a gradual curtailment of capitalism concomitant with an increase in states’ powers of planning and redistribution.

Few have recognised and accurately described this problem. I recently met up with Steve Forbes, and we talked about this very issue. Forbes mentioned two factors that have caused the diminution of economic freedom in the US. “One is the rise of modern socialism,” he said. “Rather than the old idea of government ownership of companies and industries, modern socialists achieve control through expanding the regulatory state. Regulators more and more tell you what you can and cannot do.”

The latest example is the raft of proposed rules concerning electric vehicles. By coercion, the government wants to destroy the use of the internal combustion engine and make the auto industry a virtual ward of the government. And Europe is even further down this road. The European Union has banned the registration of new cars with combustion engines from 2035. “These proposed bans in Europe and now the US are indeed part and parcel of a planned, modern socialist economy,” says Forbes.

Central banks are another problem: They are already acting as if they were planning authorities; originally set up to guarantee the stability of monetary value, they now see themselves as engaged in the task of neutralising market forces. By de facto abolishing market interest rates, the European Central Bank partially deactivated the pricing mechanism that is an essential feature of any functioning market economy. Rather than containing excessive public debt, this has only exacerbated the issue.

“The policy of keeping interest rates low over an extended period of time will increasingly distort asset prices and exacerbate the danger of another economic collapse followed by a financial crisis as soon as this policy is jettisoned,” the economist Thomas Mayer warns. It does not take a crystal ball to predict that these crises will be blamed on ‘capitalism,’ even though they are in fact the result of a violation of capitalist principles. A wrong diagnosis inevitably leads to the wrong treatment being prescribed – in this case, even more governmental intervention in an even more weakened market.

Once upon a time, socialists simply used to nationalise commercial enterprises. Today, elements of a planned economy are introduced in other ways – increasing governmental intervention in commercial decision-making processes and a range of fiscal and regulatory measures, subsidies and legal restrictions that curtail the freedom of entrepreneurs. In this way, the German energy market has gradually been transformed into a planned economy.

This is possible only because many people are simply unaware – or have forgotten – that the free market is the foundation on which our current level of prosperity is based. This is particularly true of the millennial generation, whose only experience of the socialist regimes in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries comes through history books, if at all. ‘Capitalism’ and ‘free market’ have become dirty words.

A survey conducted by the renowned institute Ipsos MORI in 2021 and 2022 in 34 countries in Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia for my book In Defence of Capitalism showed that there were only six countries in which the number of people who associate capitalism with positive terms is greater than the number who associate it with negative things. What is it exactly that bothers people about capitalism? If you look at the survey’s overall conclusions, it is – in this order – primarily the opinion that:

 

• capitalism is dominated by the rich, they set the political agenda;
• capitalism leads to growing inequality;
• capitalism promotes selfi shness and greed;
• capitalism leads to monopolies;
• capitalism entices people to buy produces they don’t need.