Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everyone. Welcome to the 242nd episode of the Atlas Society Ask. I'm Lawrence Olivo, senior project Manager here at the Atlas Society, the leading non profit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Iron Rand in creative ways like animated videos and graphic novels. Today our CEO Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but I am excited to have with me Atlas Society senior scholars Stephen Hicks and Richard Salzman for their topic about the capitalist peace theory. It's going to be discussing the thesis where examining the claim that capitalist societies tend toward peace and authoritarian ones tend away from it. As always, you can ask your questions in the comments section. We'll try to get to as many as one as we can at the end, but for now I'll pass things over to Stephen. Thank you both for joining us.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Thanks Lawrence. Thanks for the intro. Now this topic is a huge sub debate within the overall capitalism versus its contenders political and economic theories. And here the value in question is an assumption that being warlike is a disvalue and being more peaceful is a value. So we're not necessarily talking even about maximizing freedom or maximizing wealth or maximizing innovation. It's a sub debate focused on this particular set of issues. People on the left don't like the capitalist piece a position for obvious reasons. Just a priori, capitalism is bad. But they will have an argument that argues that capitalism is more warlike. One of the reasons why people have conflicts is conflict over resources. Capitalism on their account is all about me, me, me more, more, more that puts people in conflict. So if you just extend that out, it makes sense from their perspective that capitalism is going to be a more warlike kind of system from their perspective, at least in the good news versions of socialism. For example, socialism is about caring for other people, sharing your stuff. So it's going to be more groovy and more peaceful as a, as an economic system. But the, the people who are on the pro capitalist side have some powerful theoretical arguments and a lot of empirical evidence that the argument actually goes the other way way. Socialism is a kind of authoritarianism. It tends to be conflictual. Capitalism is based on trade, respecting property rights, giving people freedom and so forth. So it tends to be more peaceful. Now one thing I want to just spend a couple of minutes on is a somewhat definitional issue, but there's also a substantive issue buried in that sometimes the capitalist peace thesis is seen as a synonym of a democratic peace system. The idea here being that they're both talking about the same sort of thing. Some people prefer to call it capitalism, other people call it democracy more broadly.
And then again the claim there would be that it's the democratic or capitalist systems that are more, more peaceful than their, than their contenders. My view is that those are naming two distinct theses within a broader liberal space.
And one of the sub debates tends to emphasize the capitalistic elements that it's. If you have a free society as to say a society that's based on individuals being able to make their own choices on economic matters, become entrepreneurs, trade with whomever they want, secure property rights, and you go through all of the institutions of capitalism. But conceiving of capitalism a little more narrowly as focusing on a set of economic principles and focused on the economic portions of social interactions, that it is primarily the capitalistic elements in modern democratic liberal capitalist societies that get the lion's share of the credit for the peacefulness here. Now, here the idea is that capitalists are by and large committed to the principle of property rights. And so if you're committed to property rights, as capitalism is, you push that in your culture, people will be less taking of other people's stuff, which is one of the major causes of war historically. Capitalists are more willing to say I need to be self responsible and make my own way in the world. So the capitalist ethic militates against the idea that I should be out just trying to take other people's stuff. Capitalism has a built in tolerance. If you and I are trying to form a deal, we can't agree, then we're just going to go our separate ways. We expect that there's, there's going to be lots of competitors and my product is not for everyone. So we have to be tolerant of people's different choices and there are going to be lots of choices and people will be trying all sorts of experimenting and so forth. And so that tolerance takes away many of the impetuses toward war and so forth. So the capitalist peace thesis, as I like to think of it more narrowly, focuses on those economics indicators and tries to assess how much they are responsible for making societies more peaceful to the extent that they become more, more more capitalistic. The closely related but I think distinct thesis is the democratic peace thesis. And again, democracy is one of those concepts that can be used narrowly, it can be used broadly.
So we can mean democracy just means everybody gets to vote and we have a mechanism that says it's going to be majority or super majorities and whatever they decide, that's what we're going to do socially. But there's a broader conception of democracy which is just to say that we have a society of people who are free and self governing. And part of that then is going to be various kinds of voting institutions right along the way. But democracy means something more broad. It means a certain kind of assignment of sovereignty across the entire population or the entire adult population. However it may be, and the expectation there is that the people have the power, it's not a small number of people who have power over other people that the people should be free to exercise their power as individuals. However it is that they, that they want. Democratic institutions so conceived broadly then tend to diffuse power. Sometimes they will have formal separations of power, but rather than in monarchic systems or air aristocratic systems, it's not one or a few people who have all of the power. It's a diffuse system of power. And often power is rotated among various sub institutions within the democracy. And then the claim here is that it's this political set of organizational institutions which may or may not work very closely with capitalistic economic institutions, but it's more these political institutions that get the lion's share of the credit for making modern societies that adopt them more, more, more peaceful. So the argument here for example is say wars traditionally require getting people to go to war and that means conscripting people. And then the claim can be an empirical claim that democracies since requires a vote of the majority of the people, they're less likely to vote themselves into conscription and so less likely to go to go to war. Or you will say democracies will in their robust form be about 50% men, 50% women. Many of those women are going to be mothers. And so one of those sub debates is going to be it's very hard to get mothers to vote to send their sons off to war. There's going to be a built in check on democracies going off to war and so on. So I prefer to separate those two as much as possible, recognizing that they are close siblings and that to then see them as both part of a broader category that I call liberalism, where the capitalism focuses on the more economically focused parts of liberalism and the democracy, or I think better calling it democratic republicanism, focuses on the more political political institutions that those jointly are going to be responsible for. The claim that now needs to be argued that such institutions, some sort of broadly liberal democratic capitalistic society, is going to be much less warlike than all of the conceivable alternatives to it. And on the evidence question we can argue in terms of principles. We can say things like people who Are liberal, are in favor of freedom, and they're in favor of respecting people's freedom to do whatever they want. So they're going to be more tolerant, they're going to be respectful of property rights, they're going to expect diversity and trying to have people going off and living their own life, experiment freely and so forth. So all just from those initial principles, to the extent that those are encouraged in a liberal society, society, you're taking away many of the traditional incentives or motivations that people had for war. There might of course be all of the economic incentives, but we have property rights. Plus also people, to the extent that we have a liberal capitalist society, they're going to be doing business internationally. Your customers are in one country, your vendors and suppliers are another country.
They're bringing you millions or billions of dollars of business. You don't want to go to war with those countries because billions of dollars or millions of dollars are at stake for your, for your, for your business. And so again, from general principles, we can make, make that kind of argument. We can make the argument that by contrast, obviously standard dictatorships are all about power and force and compelling people to do what those in power want. So they're not going to have any problem with extending that, that, that ethos to international relations and just using power to get what they, what they want. Socialist regimes are requiring that everybody be on the same page and following the government. And they tend to centralize authority much more robustly than capitalist societies or liberal societies do. And once you have concentrated power in the hands of a few people, then if they decide to go to war, and the whole ethos of socialism is that everybody is supposed to be on the same page, and you've decided under socialism, government being an institution of compulsion, that you don't have a problem with using compulsion to get what you want, then that sets those regimes up for being much more likely to go to war to get what they want and resolve their differences. Now, addition to those arguments from principle, and those can be worked out very interestingly, much more detail. There's a significant amount of historical evidence, if we think, for example, of the long sweep of human history. Much of it is just war, war, war, Tribes constantly fighting against each other, empires, feudal empires, trying to expand their territory for the glory of the king or for the glory of the Caesar, or the glory of the pharaoh or whomever. And so there's a built in power glory motivation that seems to be dominant within, within feudalism. And then the idea that you can use vast majorities of the population for the glory of the, for the glory of the king. And so war, conquering the other, the neighboring king and taking his stuff is how you make your kingdom more, more glorious. So if we think it's not until the modern world, for example, when in the 1700s, perhaps the late 1600s, in England, some western societies started to become more capitalist, more liberal, more democratic. They started to become less and less warlike. So for example, if you think of just, you know, take England and France for example.
You know, England and France, the history before both of them became by and large democratic, capitalist kinds of nations is just war, war, war, war, war. England and France after the Napoleonic wars, a little bit later, France for France were substantially more free market, substantially more democratic, more republican and so forth. And for over 200 years, England and France have never fought a war against each other. So you can take other pairs of nations that traditionally have had war, they became more democratic, slash capitalist, liberal, stop fighting wars against each other. When we get on into the 20th century, for example, what we then see is in the modern world, rise of various kinds of socialistic regimes. National socialism, international socialism, communism, fascism. All of those areas brands much more collectivistic, much more socialistic in their economic policy, much more concentrating power in the straight for the glory of the state, for the glory of the people, for the glory of the working classes or whatever. And then suddenly we are into a huge era of World War, war, World War II, Cold War, all of the proxy wars around the world and so forth. So again, it is then the non capitalist nations that are causing the wars. I want to make a plug just for the last few minutes here, for saying that all of these arguments from political principle, from economic principle, and the historical evidence are important. I think they do come down ultimately on the side of the capitalist peace thesis or the democratic peace thesis. But I want to say that those are never going to be enough just because underlying all of those economic political issues are very deep philosophical issues. And my, my remaining evidence is going to be some serious philosophical people for whom they will agree that capitalism does tend to peace, but they are still not in favor of capitalism. Or they will agree that liberalism, democracy and so forth tend toward peace, but they are still opposed to capitalism. So that then is to say, trouting a political value like peacefulness or an economic value like being richer is not enough for them. They're more fundamental from their perspective, philosophical issues at stake. So here, for example, I want to give a quotation from Friedrich Engels. And Engels is of course most famous for being co author with Karl Marx of Communist Manifesto. And here I've got a piece from, or just a quotation rather from Friedrich Engels, when both he and Marx were younger men. They were just starting their.
They're working together, working toward the Communist Manifesto and other works and so forth. And here is Friedrich Engels in 1843, four years before communist Manifesto, arguing that capitalism, free markets and so forth do in fact bring peace.
That is not the case, that capitalism causes war, but he is still opposed to it. So let's read the quotation together. You, you here being the capitalists, you have brought about the fraternization of the peoples, but the fraternity is the fraternity of thieves. And then just an interjection here about the capitalist species, specifically you again, the capitalist. You have reduced the number of wars, so the capitalist pieces thesis is true, but to earn all the bigger profits in peace. So again interjecting here. So the capitalists have in fact reduced the number of wars, but they're just making more money and that's a bad thing from Engels's perspective, to intensify to the utmost the enmity between individuals, the ignominious war of competition. When have you done anything out of pure humanity from consciousness of the futility of the opposition between the general and the individual interest? When have you been moral without being interested, without harboring at the back of your mind immoral egoistical motives? So we can have this argument about whether capitalist peace thesis is true or not, and many people will want to argue that it isn't. But even if you get those people to agree that capitalism is in fact the peaceful politically, economically, they're going to say we are still opposed to capitalism and we want to abolish it because it's based on the wrong ethics. And ethics is more important than capitalist peace, capitalist prosperity and so forth. Now, when you see this language at the bottom here, moral without being interested and rejecting any sort of immoral egoistical motives, one might think that Engels is channeling Immanuel Kant. And I think that's the right move to make. Kant was everywhere in moral philosophy, particularly in German moral philosophy philosophy by the time we get to the 1800s. So for example, I want to go then back to Kant, who had died in, in 1804, from some essays he written, wrote in the decade before he, he, he, he died. But notice what he's doing in this essay. This is a piece called Perpetual Peace that he's agreeing with the, the capitalist peace thesis, the capitalism or the commercial peace Thesis, thesis is true. So the quote is the spirit of commerce which is incompatible with war. So if you want war, you're not going to have a commercial society. If you have a commercial society, you're not going to get a lot of war. And he's arguing that the spirit of commerce has become more predominant in the modern world. And he expects that to continue. The spirit of commerce which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state. And then Kant then goes on to argue that this is a bad thing. And he has a couple of arguments here. One is that again, it's the wrong motivations. The spirit of commerce is based on profit, it's based on self interest. It is not based on people being selfless, on doing their duty, on being obedient to a higher cause. And Kant wants to argue that first we have to get the right morality in place and then build the proper kind of society. And that's not going to be a commercial society of egoists, even if they are peaceful. And then as a part sidebar here, Kant also had kind of a significant, not a super significant, but a strong dose of anti Semitism or anti Jewishness about him. And he saw the Jews as capital par excellence. And so there's various lines where you can see him saying things that, you know, the Jews are capitalist, they're commercial, they're not proper moral individuals, they're not really properly part of German society. So they're immoral and vile because they're a nation of capitalist swindlers, basically speaking. So the point here is that you will find many people who are opposed to capitalism will grant that it increases, it increases wealth, it increases people peace, but they are still opposed to it. They want a more deep philosophical revolution as well.
And it is, by Contrast, in the 1800s, a slightly younger contemporary of Friedrich Engels, John Stuart Mill, who is broadly speaking a liberal in his political philosophy, in his moral philosophy. True, there are problems with Mill's philosophy, but nonetheless he is generally speaking committed to the liberal cause. So free speech, widespread tolerance, equal rights for women, abolishing slavery, free market institutions, property rights and so forth, it's all a bundle here. And Mill is on board with the capitalist peace thesis as a positive thing. So what you find is people following Kant, like Hegel, Fichte and others, who want to have a more militaristic society, not necessarily in a left wing direction, and other people following Kant, like Engels and Marx, who want to have a non capitalistic society in a more left wing direction. Both of them are rejecting capitalism not because they think it is, is too warlike, they think it's because it's peaceful, but it's based on the wrong philosophy and they want to reject it. That philosophical case is absolutely important. So just as a final bibliographic note, this is the reference to Rand's piece on the roots of, of war, where she recognizes the both the democratic peace, the capitalist peace, the more broad liberal peace theses as economic and political arguments, but makes the case that we really need to take up and win the philosophical battle as well. Okay, I'm going to pause there.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Okay, thank you so much for that, Stephen. Richard, we'll pass it over to you.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: Great. Can you see this slide?
[00:21:49] Speaker A: We can now.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:52] Speaker C: Stephen, thank you. I, I love that and a fabulous foundation. I like the move to the philosophic roots of this. One of the great things about the Ayn rand piece in 1966 was when she said, I'm going to discuss the roots of war. This is 1966. This is the middle of the Cold War, in the middle of concerns about, well, four years earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis. So the opening, I think the opening line of that essay was people are very worried about nuclear exchange. Yet do they actually look at the essence of the kind of governments that might engage in this?
If you told her then that Fast forward in 1991, the Soviet Union wouldn't exist anymore, I'm not sure she would have believed it. However, at that time, the Cold War meant mutually assured destruction. Talk about sacrifice.
The foreign policy establishment's view was Soviet Union and America should not actually put up defensive shields. They should expose and jeopardize their populations to nuclear obliteration to get a, quote, balance of power to preserve the peace. Incredible.
Really crazy. But what was her theme in that essay? I'm going to go through, I have a few slides here, but I'm going to go through this sequence with. The sequence is very interesting because Professor Hicks is absolutely right. There is a long history and it includes people like Mill and others. I guess you could even go back to ancient Greece. People trying to theorize about what causes war, what preserves peace, what kind of societies. And one way of thinking about this is it's kind of binary that's not popular today, but martial and commercial.
Martial and commercial. The martial spirit, so to speak. Warlike warriors, heroes. Why? Because they're martial. Why? Because they're warriors. Because they go to war. And usually historically. Tell me if I'm wrong, Stephen, that that's been seen as moral because sacrificial.
I'm going to war, I'm going to sacrifice. Even to this day American soldiers are said to be moral because they sacrifice. They, they gave the highest price their lives to not that they loved. Liberty versus the commercial. So that is a theme that runs through at least 2500 years of analysis of this kind of topic, namely the martial spirit versus the commercial spirit. The martial spirit seen as warrior like, but altruistic and self sacrificing. And that's considered angelic in the altruist view. And the commercial spirit is I want to trade, I want to make money, I want to profit. I really do not want war because that really destroys things. But as, as Professor Hicks put it, people are uncomfortable with this because it sounds self interested, it is self interested. The profit motive is the commercial manifestation of rational self interest.
So but I want to say something positive right up front, I think and I, I think Professor Hicks agrees with me. It's not, that's not the issue really. This is a very positive development that if you can see my first slide, that there is such a concept in social science and it exists. I'm in the political science department of Duke University. There is a concept called the capitalist peace, which is amazing because the Marxist view is. Professor Hicks said for many, many years and mostly after Marx died, it was Lenin who did this. Lenin in after Marx's death in 1883 is looking around and saying I don't see any revolutions that Marx predicted. So I need to backfill here and come up with a different theory. What was his theory? Imperialism. The last. He called it, the Lenin called it the last stage of capitalism is having exploited the worker domestically, they need to go abroad and exploit cheap labor and resources abroad in places like Africa and elsewhere. So his excuse for why no revolution in England, why no revolution in America, they hadn't completely sucked the blood out of American labor yet, so they had to go to African labor and elsewhere. I mean that's why you get in the 60s, 70s and elsewhere, hatred of multinationals, hatred of free trade, the desire to get rid of all the colonies which is not a capitalist system, it's a pre capitalist system. But let me just show, I'm going to go through these slides very quickly.
There's a very early formulation.
Professor Hicks had some earlier ones. I understand that here's one from Montesquieu, who the founding fathers of America absolutely adored. They adored Locke, but they also adored Monte. Montesquieu gave us the idea of separation of powers. But Montesquieu had this great idea of capitalism. He called it commerce creates peace.
Look at this quote from 1748. This is before the revolution in America. The natural effect of commerce is to bring peace.
Two nations that negotiate between themselves become reciprocally dependent if one has an interest in buying and the other in selling. And all unions are based on mutual needs.
This is a slide from my Duke lecture, so notice the Q I asked below the question. Here's the real question. I don't think Montesquieu thought of it this way, but objectivists should. Is it commerce itself that causes peace?
Because that's kind of like the capitalist peace theory or is it first that government, this was very common in the 1700s, is rational, is enlightened, has the rule of law, that's what ensures peaceful dealings. That's what leads to commerce. That what, that's what leads to prosperity. Because the Marxist view was. If the Marxist view was capitalists are blood sucking vampires who having exploited domestics, now going to exploit foreigners. Montesquieu's view is basically like no, there's no exploitation at all. But he still didn't get to the point yet where the idea was no, actually government is restrained. It protect individual rights, that permits prosperity.
Then people trade and there's peace.
So just think of that, just think of that for a minute. As to the causal chain were thinking about now the reason I wanted to bring up Professor Hicks mentioned this as he actually should, he should have. This is a very, this is a much more important essay than the whole capitalist peace movement recognizes.
Because in 1966 this is right in the middle of the Cold War in her book called Capitalism the unknown ideal.
The second essay, not the 16th essay, not the 23rd essay, the second essay is what causes war by the way, the first essay is what is capitalism? I think this is very significant and underappreciated. It's really underappreciated. Ayn Rand is basically saying statism causes war. The tribal premise, I'm not going to quote all this causes war as, as Professor Hicks put it, if you're as a government willing to violate the rights of your citizens, why would you even question violating the rights of your neighbors? Of course you would violate the rights of your neighbors. But more than that, if a status collectivist socialist government runs a country, it's going to run it into the ground, it's going to create poverty and if it cares anything about oh my God, we're going to be overthrown because there's poverty, they go start stealing stuff from neighbors Anyway, I wanted to just let. I'm not going to quote all this, but here's Ayn Rand saying, it's statism and the underlying philosophic idea of collectivism, meaning the individual should serve the state no matter what the state wants to do. And if the state wants to go abroad and loot people, do it.
Ayn Rand, I don't know if you know this, but Ayn Rand and her followers, like Martin Anderson and others, were central to getting rid of the draft in America under Nixon in 1973, a year before Nixon resigned. And Nixon, if you remember, ran in 1968 saying, I'm going to end the Vietnam War, which Ayn Rand opposed on the grounds that it was self sacrificing and there was no American interest.
I mean, she hated communism, you know that. So she did not like the idea that North Vietnam was invading South Vietnam, making it socialist. But her view was America first.
Just as she said, interpersonally you should be egoistic. She said, internationally you should be egoistic. You should. If America is a great country and believes in liberty, that should be the primary.
Here's the point. Ayn Rand actually influenced the whole capitalist piece research project. I don't know if people know this, but I'm going to the next one. This man who is a hero to me, I teach political science at Duke and I show his stuff all the time. Rummel, his name is Rudolph Rummel in a far distant place called the University of Hawaii.
And I noticed in the chat someone said, what about Rummel?
I know Rummel very well and he's a hero of mine. Rummel was influenced by Ayn Rand.
He read Ayn Rand, he read Ayn Rand's essay and he said, okay, I think she's right, but I need to go collect the evidence. I need to go the evidence to see whether it's actually true. And, but at the time, however, what, what I mean by the time, look down below, it says 1995.
He said, no one has collected the evidence of how do you characterize governments as democracies are not democracies, as capitalists are not as liberal or not. But his conclusion is, a preliminary conclusion was, oh my gosh, he's right.
Less free countries go to war, especially against free countries, and free countries do not go to war against each other.
Now notice this. In the beginning, he says, democracies are less warlike. Rummel was still learning at this point. Professor Hicks brought this out beautifully. Is it democracies or is it liberal democracies?
And later, Rommel realized, oh my gosh, it's liberal or capitalist. The. I would put it this way.
Democracy is a procedural standard.
Demos means people. What to. What role are people playing in politics? Are they voting? Do they have elections? Are there free and fair elections? See, the idea, it's not substantive. It's not substantive at all. In other words, capitalism or liberalism, as Professor Hicks put it, is substantive. It says, we want to be free, we want to be capitalistic. But democracies don't necessarily vote for that. In Nazi Germany, they voted for the Nazis.
So it was a democratic choice. But they voted for National Socialists, who later shut down the democratic system. In Venezuela in 1998, that was a democratic regime, a democratic system at least. And they voted for Chavez and then Madeira, and then eventually they shut. So I think Professor Hicks is absolutely right. And here's Rummel and here's Rand, and they're saying, you know what? It's not really this procedural idea of people voting. It's what are they voting for? And if they're illiberal, they will vote for illiberal regimes.
Venezuela in 1998 voted for a liberal regime. So did the Nazis. The, the Germans in the 1930s, they voted for the Nazis.
And George Bush, for example, George W. After 9, 11, what was he pushing? He wasn't pushing the idea that people should be pro capitalist. He said they should be pro democratic.
And so the forward strategy of freedom, which the Bush administration pushed, which had the word, it did have the word freedom in it, but it equivocated on that and basically said, freedom to us means hold elections. That's it. And if you end up voting for illiberal, unfree regimes, that's okay, because we got nothing else. And that's what happened actually, in the mid 2000, late 2000, the. What's called the Arab Spring, if you remember, there were a bunch of elections in Egypt and elsewhere, and remember the purple finger? Everyone had the purple thing. I voted, I voted. What did they do? They voted for tyrants. They voted for the Muslim Brother Brotherhood. So I, I hope you see here that the, the issue here is not the procedural issue of who votes.
In Ayn Rand's view, and in our view, that the liberal view, it's, you don't get to vote to other people's rights to go away.
Substantively, liberalism is what should be endorsed.
Now I want to say something about, first of all, I want us to show the importance of ideas. Rommel, I've read his diaries and his letter. He was influenced by Ayn Rand, this is very important because Rommel documented in gory detail all the types of government, what they did. And notice the book on the right, Death by Government, a very, A very great title. 1994, after the Soviet Union disbanded, the Soviet Union actually opened up all its files and Rummel went rummaging through all the vibes and in chapter and verse documented how much government had killed in the Soviet Union, in Red China and Nazi Germany, how many people they killed. But he was an early advocate of this idea of let's attribute peace to capitalism.
Here's some. A more new version of this. Eric Gartzky in 2005, now, this is 20 years ago, and he said, is it capitalism or democracy that gives us peace? And he said, guess what? He said, it's capitalism, it's liberalism. It's not the procedural voting mechanism, because we can get illiberal democracy. Notice the closing paragraph of this essay from 2005 gets to Professor Hicks's view that, you know what the roots of this is?
Ethics.
And he says, the search for world peace has long been consumed with the need for selflessness, though altruism appears to have achieved little pacific impact. In other words, it doesn't deliver peace. If you know what this. If you know what he's referring to, he's referring to Woodrow Wilson a hundred or more years ago, saying we should be selfless servants of global peace. And he said, that's why we should go to World War I and sacrifice a bunch of Americans for no reason whatsoever.
Then he goes on instead, it's a byproduct of self interest.
This is amazing because this is Eric Gartsky saying self interest, egoism is the source of peace.
And Ayn Rand argued, of course, that egoism is the source of capitalism.
Quote, the flowering of economic freedom, what some have derisively labeled as greed.
Yes, like, like Engels and Marx. Right. Stephen. Has begun to dampen the fires of war that many seem perennial, inherent in product of civilization itself. Amazing. This essay, if you look on the right, is a little bit technical. Sorry. But, you know, at the bottom, the X axis is economic freedom.
All right, he did, he did a bunch of studies of a bunch of countries. And the vertical axis is how many, how much, how, how much war.
Just look at the upward. Look at the. The more you're free, the less you're at war.
Wow. That's what that curve means. Then he goes down below and he says, what about democracy?
So we can measure democracy. We can measure, you know, elections and fair. No relation.
There's no relationship between whether you're a democratic state and whether you go to war or not. That's why the line is horizontal. The line above is upward moving, because the less free you are, the more you're going to engage in conflict. It's an. It was an amazing discovery, but I think. Here's the sequencing. Ayn rand in the mid-60s said, here's my theory of how this works.
Rummel said, we need to start documenting this. And his original mistake was to say that it's democracies.
Then Gart said, it's not democracies, it's capitalism. It's liberalism, it's freedom, which is what Professor Hicks said. Now, look at this book. This is only 2009. It's an amazing book. Here's the summary. This book from. It's called the Invisible Hand of Peace.
Wow. What is it? The Invisible Hand. It sounds like Adam Smith.
This book shows that the domestic institutions associated with capitalism, namely private property and competitive market structures, have promoted peace between states over the past two centuries. Two centuries, quote. It employs a wide range of historical and statistical evidence. In other words, go by the science to illustrate both the broad applicability of these claims and their capacity to generate new explanations. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Unbelievable. By showing that this capitalist peace has historically been stronger, stronger than the peace among democratic states, these findings also suggest that contemporary American foreign policy should be geared toward promoting economic liberalization rather than democracy.
Wow. This is written in an age when everyone was thinking, let everyone vote.
Just let them vote, and they won't go to war with us. That's not. Here's McDonald saying that isn't going to do it. It's not enough to vote procedurally because they might vote for illiberalism. No, what we need is. What we need is liberalism. You want peace, you need liberalism, which he associates with capitalism.
All right, I'm going to finish quickly with this.
Ayn Rand said in the Roots of War, it was remarkable, she thought, for a hundred years when the world was the most capitalist, namely between the Napoleonic wars, which ended in 1815, until World War I, which started in 1914.
She said it was peaceful and prosperous.
There's the numbers, there's the evidence staring you in the face. There it is. If you look at why it went awry, it went awry after World War I. And World War I was not started by capitalist regimes. It was started by Germany. Was. Was a monarchy.
All right, now look. Look at this one. This is crazy. Death rates from wars, upward, upward, upward, upward from 1400. That, that number's wrong. It's not 2000, it's 1700 or so. You need to change that. Notice the trend downward though. During the Enlightenment, during the John Locke, the Founding Fathers, to just before the wealth, 1700-1900, in the world, downward.
Less war, less death. A more peaceful, prosperous, commercial world.
And now since then, what? The 20th century was terrible. The first half of it, terrible. After that green little box I've given you, you see up top, look at Second World War, First World War. The death rates are off the charts, but then they go down. So here's the good news. They do go down after the so especially after the Soviet Union is disbanded. So the good news is death rates from war, wars generally are going down in the last 60 years.
Good news. I think the better news is people are starting, people, academics are starting to realize that it's due to capitalism, it's due to liberalism. It's not an accident. They hate Reagan, they hate Thatcher, I know all that. They deride neoliberalism. But look at this line going, plunging downward in the last 25 years. Yes, we have wars, yes, we have people being killed. But relative to history, it's a more peaceful existence. Now here's Steven Pinker from Harvard. Steven Pinker explains how capitalism is killing war. I love that.
Worldwide battle deaths per 100,000 people since World War II.
Whatever you see in the headlines, you can't avoid the evidence that he shows. Here we are living in a more peaceful world. Why we're living in a more capitalist world with all its.
It's not pure capitalism. We know that. The audience listening to us tonight knows they want pure capital. What I'm saying is the more capitalism we get. These numbers are amazing. These numbers are worth heralding for our side. And notice they're plummeting.
So capitalism, civilization, egoism, profit making, commerce is a beautiful thing in terms of peace, but that's not the common view. Last slide, I'll leave you with.
Social scientists love to measure everything, which is kind of good.
Economic freedom indexes, political freedom indexes. Here's a global peace index, believe it or not, and, and color coded, you can tell where there's peace and where there's not by country. And guess what? The more developed, commercial, industrial, capitalistic, egoistic, profit oriented countries are more peaceful and the other ones aren't.
So I'll stop with that. And I've gone on too long, so there you go.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you, Richard. Now we have about 10 minutes, nine minutes left. So I didn't know if you want to do some brief back and forth. We do have some questions in the audience in case you wanted to try to tackle a couple of those before we close out.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: I think we should go to questions.
We've been talking a lot already.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Perfect. In that case, this is sort of the tee off what you sort of close with. Richard, this question comes from lock, stock and barrel says, of course we don't live in a perfect capitalist society. I guess the question is what a mixed economic system tends towards, which would be, I guess, a bit more varied depending on the system. I think he's asking like the United States today, given our current system.
[00:47:50] Speaker C: Yeah. Very briefly, I would say if, if our thesis, which I think it is our thesis is capitalism peaceful statism, not we do have a mixed system. And it's. And to the extent it advocates. And by the way, trade wars sounds like economic, doesn't sound like shooting wars. Trade wars can lead to truding shooting wars. We definitely have a mixed system. So what you need to keep your eye on is what part of the mix sounds or feels or looks like statism.
And I would say the Trump trade barriers are that way.
And so that leans in the direction of war. On the other hand, I have to give him credit for saying, I don't want forever wars. I am for America first.
I don't want America sacrificing herself for the benefit of other nations. So Trump is a mixed case because I think half his case is America first self interest. Self interest, not just intern personally, which is dying. Rand's view. Right. But internationally. So there is such a thing as an egoistic foreign policy. And I think it, I, I endorse it. I like the idea of him saying, I do not want to be sacrificing American lives, treasure or other things for the benefit of other countries. So withdrawal from NATO or things like that, which are opposed by some on the right wing, to me is more for peace.
But the other part about trade, ironically, is more or less for peace. Bastiat years ago said, if goods can't cross borders, troops will.
So that's the capitalist peace thesis. The idea of please don't antagonize trading partners. I'll stop there.
Okay.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: Stephen, do you have anything to follow up with that?
[00:49:50] Speaker B: Not on that.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: Okay, I'm going to combine two questions here that I think are closely related. Wyatt516 is asking, could capitalist peace be an effect of broader geopolitical stability rather than an independent cause of peace? And this ties into another one that was mentioning From Scott, did large scale war itself become less common in a nuclear age? So are there, is there data or other factors that might be playing an external role aside from what we discussed so far?
[00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, absolutely, yeah. This is why I want to say, on my view, the capitalist piece and economic, emphasizing the strictly economic issues of trade, property rights and so forth, is only part of the story that what has happened in the 20th century, particularly after the end of World War II, is the institutions of capitalism, world trade and, and so forth extending, but also lots of other parts of the broader liberal package, some of them that don't have very much to do directly with, with economic issues. So the status of women pushing for religious toleration.
So subordination of women is not necessarily an economic issue. Whether women get an education or not, whether they can make their own choices in romantic partners and control their sexual lives and so forth, that is part of a broader liberalization. Same thing with respect to the pushes for religious toleration. And now, you know, religion and economic matters do have some overlap, but religion and worldviews is not primarily an economic matter. But the idea that individuals should be free to conduct their own religion, to not be religious, to change their religion and so forth has been part of the broader literal push. So those, and I think several other things that are part of the big liberal philosophical, cultural approach have contributed as well.
[00:52:08] Speaker C: Lawrence? Yes, I've seen some of the questions and I'm consolidating some of them. So I want to say something very quickly because I'm seeing a pattern in the questions. When Eisenhower in his farewell address in early 1961 warned about the military industrial complex, the idea that munitions makers might be profiting from war and, and therefore getting the US involved. This is relevant to the capitalist peace argument, right? Because Ike was obviously pro American, semi pro capitalist, but, and, and a war guy who helped us win World War II and yet worried. This comes up a lot today because the neo conservatives are very much for the idea that the US should be involved in foreign affairs. I just wanted to say that it is a weird mix of Marxist theory that capitalism is warlike. Why? Because the munition makers are profit seeking parasites.
The way to answer this or to think about it is it is true, I think in today's mixed economy that the Pentagon and munition makers work together. And it might be true that they want perpetual wars in a, in a twisted way of we don't want to win the wars, we just want them to go on and on and on. So we can sell stuff and Trump is against that. I don't want to get into Trump too much, but, and he is being opposed on the grounds that he doesn't want forever wars. That doesn't mean Trump is pro capitalist, but it relates to the capitalist peace argument in the following way. He doesn't actually think that profit seeking munition makers make us go to war.
The Ayn Rand view is if the government violates rights and doesn't give a damn about going to war, then the munition makers will come along. Right? They'll, they'll start. Once the government starts going down that path, the munition makers will lobby government and try to sell all their stuff. But the Marxist view is that the selling of the stuff itself makes politicians go to war. I'm of the view, I'm of the Ayn Rand view that namely it starts with ideology, it starts with collectivism, it starts with tribalism. If the government becomes this monster that not only violates the rights of domestics but wants to go on and violate the rights of others, that, that's going to invite lobbying and from munition makers and stuff. So it's hard to disentangle today. I know, but I think that's what's going on today. I think people are being beginning to question, not Eisenhower's analysis, but why are, why is America not America first, why is America running around the world trying to make America second, third, fourth, fifth, to defend others. So I just wanted to throw that in there because I saw five questions that sound like that question sound like that issue at least.
[00:55:25] Speaker A: Perfect. Well, with that, Stephen, did you have anything last final comment.
[00:55:29] Speaker B: Let me, let me keep us for one extra minute if we can. I think this is a rich, partly theoretical, partly empirical topic that we, we need to take up. So I think it is true to say that if you are in the munitions business, then you want to sell as many munitions as you want. So built into capitalism and its profit motive is if the government is your major customer, you want to sell as much as possible to, to your customer. So the empirical part then is going to be to say that the munitions industry is one portion of an overall economy.
[00:56:03] Speaker C: Right.
[00:56:04] Speaker B: And so you make that measure and if it's like 3% of your economy, right. Presumably you've got 90% of the other capitalists in your economy importing stuff and.
[00:56:13] Speaker C: Exporting stuff who don't want war.
[00:56:16] Speaker B: Yes, that's right.
[00:56:17] Speaker C: I agree.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: That's also going to depend on how international, how global. And so, so it becomes a becomes an empirical matter. The theoretical point is that part of what Eisenhower and just the related general point is worried about is a kind of regulatory capture that we do have. You know, munitions makers and with the government is going to be buying munitions from them.
[00:56:43] Speaker C: Right.
[00:56:43] Speaker B: But we have to make sure that our political system is making decisions independent.
[00:56:50] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: Of the munition makers. And so you're right, capitalist peace thesis has to be working with some thesis about the political institutions and how they are conducted.
[00:57:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Independently of those set of economic incentives. So it's going to be the capitalist institutions in a political institution. And as long as that political institution has proper separations of powers, it has a civilian commander in chief, it has all of the other democratic republican procedures and those are healthy and a culture that is supporting it, then gung ho munitions sellers are not going to be a big worry.
[00:57:33] Speaker C: Agree entirely.
[00:57:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:35] Speaker C: Good distinction. Thank you, Stephen.
[00:57:38] Speaker A: Okay, thank you both for having the time to do this webinar tonight. We are at the top of the hour, so we will close out here. But I want to thank everyone who was asking questions in the comments section.
There was a lot to cover, but I think we covered most of what people were asking. But I want to remind everyone, if you have more questions, we do these scholar webinars almost monthly, so always tune back in for that. Or if you wish to travel, why not join the Atlas Society? In June, we will be in Austin, Texas for Gulf Gulch 2025, our annual student conference. The link for that is in the comments section. And for those you who will be joining us next week, our CEO Jennifer Grossman will be meeting with author Christopher Cox to discuss his book Woodrow Wilson the Light Withdrawn. Once again, Stephen, Richard, thank you both so much for doing this. Have a great rest guys.
[00:58:37] Speaker B: Had fun.
[00:58:38] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: Take care everyone.
