Chesterton also said, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” Neither capitalism nor socialism can ever create an ideal society, and actually, capitalism will eventually create socialism, because the government will need to put restraints on Big Business and will eventually feel that Big Government can do a better job itself. Think “national health care” which was just rammed down our throats without our consent. Dale Ahlquist, in his post “A Prophetic Look at National Health Care”, says, “When health care started becoming too expensive, the solution was supposed to be health insurance. But insurance quickly made health care even more expensive. On the one hand, the medical industry stopped worrying about being affordable; on the other, a new layer of private bureaucracy and overhead was added that also needed to be paid for.”
Hillaire Belloc once said that capitalism is a “Servile State” which is “a state of society in which certain fully free citizens can compel, by positive law, the other inhabitants of that society to produce wealth for them.” And Chesterton (in The Outline of Sanity) says capitalism is “the economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage.” He also states that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism – the practice of workers, especially industrial wage earners, not possessing capital or property and selling their labor to survive. With capitalism, we are all just wage slaves. Businesses become so big that they control the market (e.g. Walmart), and we must work for them because they have swallowed up all the competition.
I will leave you with this Chesterton thought, “the point is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.”
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