They would willingly eliminate the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the merchant, accusing them of interposing themselves between producer and consumer in order to fleece them both, without giving them anything of value. Or rather, the reformers would like to transfer to the state the work of the middleman, for this work cannot be eliminated. The sophism of the socialists on this point consists in showing the public what it pays to the middleman for their services and in concealing what would have to be paid to the state.

[I]t is the responsibility of whoever is hungry to get his own wheat. It is a task that concerns him...If someone else...performs this service for him and takes the task on himself, this other person has a right to compensation.

Business...its immediate self-interest is to buy at the lowest possible price, to economize...to attain the greatest results with the least effort...competition among them no less compels them to let the consumers profit from all the economies realized. Once the wheat has arrived, the businessman has an interest in selling it...and begin all over again....Guided by the comparison of prices, private enterprise distributes food all over the world, always beginning at the point of greatest scarcity, that is, where the need is felt the most. It is thus impossible to imagine an organization better calculated to serve the interests of the hungry...True, the consumer must pay the businessman for his expenses of trans-shipment, of storage, of commissions...but under what system does the one who consumes the wheat avoid paying the expenses of shipping it to him?...it is reduced to a minimum by competition.

To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be...controlled in everything.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.

Envy is a widespread frailty. It is certain that many intellectuals envy the higher income of prosperous businessmen and that these feelings drive them toward socialism. They believe that the authorities of a socialist commonwealth would pay them higher salaries than those that they can earn under capitalism.

The majority of businessmen are prevented from resorting to bribery either by their moral convictions or by fear. They venture to preserve the free enterprise system and to defend themselves against discrimination by legitimate democratic methods. They form trade associations and try to influence public opinion. The results of these endeavor have been rather poor, as is evidenced by the triumphant advance of anticapitalist policies. The best that they have been able to achieve is to delay for a while some especially obnoxious measures. Demagogues misrepresent this state of affairs in the crassest way. They tell us that these associations of bankers and manufacturers are the true rules of their countries...A simple enumeration of the laws passed in the last decades by any country’s legislature is enough to explode such legends.

The specific entrepreneurial function consists in determining the employment of the factors of production. The entrepreneur...is driven solely by the selfish interest in making profits and in acquiring wealth. But he cannot evade the law of the market. He can succeed only by best serving the consumers.

Many people are utterly unfit to deal with the phenomenon of entrepreneurial profit without indulging in envious resentment. In their eyes the source of profit is exploitation of the wage earners and the consumers, i.e., an unfair reduction in wage rates and a no less unfair increase in the prices of the products. By rights there should not be any profits at all...Profit and loss are the devices by means of which the consumers exercise their supremacy on the market. The behavior of the consumers makes profits and losses appear and thereby shifts ownership of the means of production from the hands of the less efficient into those of the more efficient...In the absence of profit and loss the entrepreneurs would not know what the most urgent needs of the consumers are.

The moralists’ and sermonizers’ critque of profits misses the point. It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers...prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books...The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling "bad" things than in selling "good" things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely.

It is not the business of the entrepreneurs to make people substitute sound ideologies for unsound. It rests with the philosophers to change people’s ideas and ideals. The entrepreneur serves the consumers as they are today, however wicked and ignorant.

It is nonsensical to impute the whole product to the purveyors of labor and to pass over in silence the contribution of the purveyors of capital and of entrepreneurial ideas.

Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued.

The protesters [of globalization]... They're mad as hell, and they're going to smash up a McDonald's. McDonald's: a company that offers many people their first jobs. McDonald's: a leading employer of minorities and the under-educated.

Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups - workers, professional men, scientists, soldiers - exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. So if you want to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives - the American businessmen.

Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter...The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

...what they call "rebellion-through-consumerism" has some clear virtues. Is it really, after all, an impoverishment of public discourse if opponents of genetically modified food just shop at Fresh Fields instead of agitating for policy changes? And is smashing a Starbucks window really as helpful to the poor or the environment as, say, signing up with Working Assets for long-distance service so that a share of your monthly phone bill goes to charity? ...we can channel our concern for the poor, or the environment, through the machinery of markets, which the anti-consumerists paint as capable of channeling only greed. Bobos have caught on to what a boatload of trendy social critics keep missing: markets are better at expressing your values than politicians are.

SANCHEZ, JULIAN, Liberzine.Com, January 29, 2001

The vandalism and protest against "globalization" is really vandalism and protest against the only means of actually feeding people around the world. Yet the leftists who destroy golden rice and sabotage years of genetics research are portrayed as heroes who care deeply about the spiritual values of life. In fact, they are pro-death.

SANDEFUR, TIMOTHY, Liberty, December 2002

So it is not much of a stretch to assume that the 60,000 garbage scavengers of Manila, or any one of a dozen other misshapen urban dystopias, would jump at the chance to sew shoes for Nike or solder circuits for some local electronics outfit with a contract to supply an evil corporate multinational. Real wages and real skills, however modest, are a start to a better life...the reality is people die each day for want of a little globalism.

Consumers are not sold a bill of goods; they insist on it...What looks like exploiting desire may be fulfilling desire.

[V]ulgar Marxism...Go into almost any cultural studies course in this country and you will hear the condemnation of consumerism expounded; What we see in the marketplace is the result of the manipulation of the many for the profit of the few...Left alone we would read Wordsworth, eat lots of salad, and have meetings to discuss Really Important Subjects.

To some degree, the triumph of consumerism is the triumph of the popular will. You may not like what is manufactured, advertised, packaged, branded, and broadcast, but it is far closer to what most people want most of the time than at any other period of modern history.