In their letter on Sept. 24, Noah Wiese and Derek Dolezal stated that “The history of the United States has taught us that unchecked capitalism leads to gross abuses of human rights, including child labor and 14-hour workdays for starvation wages.” This is a tired old argument against capitalism that has been refuted time and time again.

Laissez-faire capitalism is simply the system of human freedom, including the freedom to trade. As such, it is the exact opposite of a system which leads to “gross abuses of human rights.”

In fact, the concept of individual rights was literally unknown to mankind before the advent of capitalism and the Enlightenment. Its implementation was not realized until the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

As for the theory that capitalism leads to child labor or starvation wages, it is simply the fallacy of confusing cause and effect. When capitalism came on the scene in the 18th century, it inherited the poverty of thousands of years of authoritarian, feudalist systems in which the people were at the mercy of capricious rulers or gangs roving the countryside, taking whatever and killing whomever they wanted.

The conditions that made it necessary for 14-hour workdays were not a product of capitalism, but of the systems it was replacing.

Rather than starve or work 14-hour days in rural subsistence agriculture, the people moved to cities for the very opportunity of improving themselves by factory work.

If you think the wages of the industrial revolution were low, compare them to the wages — or lack thereof — of the people starving in Europe under the monarchs who “protected” them from allegedly evil capitalists.

About 60 million people have immigrated to the United States and more to other free nations in the past 250 years. Ask them why they moved from places like Russia, Italy, Ireland and Germany, traveling like sardines in the deadly conditions below deck in ships for months to reach a land where “gross abuses of human rights” was the status quo.

Ask them why they left the supposed benevolence of Bismarck’s welfare state or the “power of the masses” held by the Bolsheviks in Russia for the dangers of “unchecked” freedom in America. Their actions speak for themselves.

Noah Stahl

Senior

Computer Engineering