Free Markets Promote Peaceful Cooperation and Racial Harmony
In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises highlights the importance of human cooperation as a prerequisite for the division of labor and free exchange. Without this, humanity remains mired in poverty:
The “state of nature” that the reformers and utopians depicted as paradisiac was in fact a state of extreme poverty and distress. “Poverty,” says Bentham, “is not the work of the laws, it is the primitive condition of the human race.” Even those at the base of the social pyramid are much better off than they would have been in the absence of social cooperation. They too are benefited by the operation of the market economy and participate in the advantages of civilized society.
Mises emphasizes that free exchange does not merely benefit specific groups but benefits everyone in society. He argues that “everybody is interested in the preservation of the social division of labor, the system that multiplies the productivity of human efforts.” He calls this “the theorem of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of the market society,” because all members of society benefit from free market exchange. He debunks the theory propagated by Marxists that capitalism is about “class affiliation” and their claim that economics is about promoting the “class interests” of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat. In what are often described as “Neo-Marxist” theories, class interests are now seen by many people as analogous to race interests, so they depict economics as an attempt to promote the interests of one race at the expense of another. They claim that “oppressor” races represent a threat to the economic interests of “oppressed” races. Failing to understand the social and economic benefits of free exchange, they cling to the false notion that economic development is a zero-sum game, in which anyone who gains can only do so at the expense of others who must lose—the fallacy that some are rich because others are poor.
This is one of the fundamental errors made by race-hustlers who claim that black people are poor because white people are rich. They view market exchange as just another platform for racial conflict, in which different races compete against each other for a f
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