Much of the first part of my book The Trouble With Canada …Still! (2010) explains and praises what I have called “the tools of freedom and wealth creation,” and the remarks apply to the US and all other free societies.
To confess, I do not like much of what raw capitalism has produced. Ugly commercial sprawl, grating and incessant advertising, the sexualization of all human life, pornography for sale even in the swankiest hotels, a population taught that the best man is the one who dies with the most toys, and so on. On the other hand, compared to all the other systems – communism, socialism, fascism, the various dictatorships, and the mixed and mixed up systems of most other nations – ours is amazing.
It supplies the ordinary citizen with largely unrestricted free choice in daily commercial life with respect to how to spend the fruits of personal labour. It is indeed a form of democratic capitalism, or what I have called a “dollar democracy” under which ordinary people make or break those who serve them well or poorly. Okay, we are half slaves to the State because we are forced to surrender up to half our earnings every year. Nevertheless, what I have called our Freedom System is exactly that. It is a superior system of private property rights, contractual rights, legal justice, protection against force and fraud, and investment opportunities large and small that enable the vast majority of people freely to guide their own lives economically, to their own ends, by their own means, in a culture more or less free of normative corruption. That is a unique, superior, universally-duplicable system that we owe to our unique history. We forget this at our peril.