Getting across the ideas to support free enterprise

DRAFT - Work in Progress!


Supporters of a flourishing, enterprising society have a critical problem: leftist ideas have captured popular imagination, and capitalism as a concept has become tainted, toxic even.

In many ways, leftist analysis is correct, in that the problems they have identified are genuine: there is indeed too much greed and corruption, but they have conflated free-market capitalism with crony corporatism, with our current system having too much of the latter and too little of the former.  Unfortunately, the left's solutions are bogus; their cure is far worse than the disease, and they would throw out the capitalist baby instead of the corporatist bathwater.

In order to address this, we need to understand the leftist mindset, appeal to what motivates them, and tackle their false assumptions in terms they will understand. The work of Jonathan Haidt is very useful in this regard - moral foundation theory provides a key to open the door into their world. Essentially, they are most activated by the Care/Harm foundation - they care deeply about the disadvantaged.

Then then we need to find a way of communicating these ideas, explaining how a reformed capitalist system would deliver more of what they are looking for than Socialism could. Unfortunately, this also means we have to explain more complicated concepts, like Moral Hazard, and demonstrate that some policies that seem to provide care actually do more damage in the long term.

Here are some concepts I believe we need to get across, and misconceptions that need to be tackled, related to Fairness and Wealth Creation.

Fairness:

1. Reward for effort: it is only fair that those who work hard to produce wealth are rewarded. That's a fundamental reason for the establishment of the Labour Party in the first place - for the workers to get their fair share of the wealth they were responsible for creating. What is someone else's fair share of what you have worked for? If that is true of exploitative business owners, it's also true everyone in society.
2. Fairness & Risk: anyone risking their capital in order to create wealth is entitled to a reward for that investment, but those without skin in the game should not be able to take advantage.
3. Unfairness & Cronyism: crony corporatism provides too many opportunities for fat cats of various descriptions an easy life on the backs of the wealth-creators. 
4. Unfairness & Free-riding: in order to look after those who genuinely can't look after themselves, we need everyone who is able to make a contribution to do so. 
5. Unfairness & Debt: kicking the can down the road is appallingly unfair; how can it be fair for future generations to fund the lifestyles for members of the current generation who haven't earned it themselves? Burdening future generations with debt is immoral.

Wealth Creation:

1. Wealth underpins everything:  in order to properly care for others, someone has to produce the wealth in the first place
2. Money is not Wealth: people are mercantilist and think of wealth in terms of money, whereas wealth is actually what you can obtain with the money: houses, cars, phones, food, experiences, etc.
3. Wealth is Dynamic: it gets destroyed, and therefore further wealth needs to be created to replace it; for economic growth to occur there needs to be more creation than destruction. Some wealth is ephemeral (used concert ticket anyone?), other forms are durable, but even houses wear out over time if not maintained. 
4. Incentives: People are lazy - if they have opportunities to seek rent they will, those with vested interests especially.  People won't risk their capital unless they will be rewarded. Changing incentives alters behaviour - encouraging them to work hard or risk their capital (both of which play a part in creating wealth) instead of seeking rent (which doesn't)
5. Cooperation: societies do not thrive and become prosperous without cooperation 
6. Competition can be the opposite of greed: it is there to keep people honest and to discourage parasitic rent-seeking
7. Profit isn't necessarily exploitation (not perhaps so easy to explain!)
8. Privilege can be earned (and thus deserved)
9. Decentralisation: no society has ever flourished in the long term, except with 3 conditions: Independence, Dispersal of Power, and Interdependence

Markets:

• Housing is not a free market - that is why there is a shortage!

We need supporting evidence for those assertions, of course, but we need to appeal to emotion as well as to reason. We should not be afraid of adopting the Tripartite motto of the French Revolution: Liberté, égalité, fraternité, even if by "Equality" we mean Equality of Dignity and Equality before the Law rather than Equality of Outcome.

Ultimately, however, those of us on the right are prepared to deal with the world how it really is, not how we would like it to be: there are no solutions - only trade-offs. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Ideally, we should be looking producing social media memes along those lines (and the list above is far from exhaustive). Exactly how do so so effectively is going to be a major challenge...