Humans have been naturally selected for Free Market Capitalism










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I would also comment that even chimps, when given food or tools, will naturally trade with other chimps, even for sex. I don't think it proves capitalism evolved, but it isn't just humans who perform that task. Thoughts?



"Children must be taught to share as a part of socialization and learning to be part of a group. When we are born we know nothing of the world except our experience."  - I've read in a paper recently on the evolution of cooperation, that human children are inherently quite good at sharing compared with other species.  This is seen as something hardwired into the human genome as a result of our evolutionary past, when we had to cooperate and share in small groups in order to survive. 

A baby spends several months at its mother's breast as an extension of her (and cognitively is still a part of her. As the child develops and the brain develops the mind expands to start learning that it (he or she) is separate from the mother. This is when we start learning about boundaries.

That is a profound statement, and there is more. Infants and children also need connections to others in the community. "The community" that was shaped by evolution was much different from the community that's shaped today by culture. Back before civilization, a child's social environment was communal, with relationships and love of family, other families, and elders. Families and neighbors were not isolated from each other, as we are today.

Today, the most social relationships (and rivalries) are developed in classrooms, with kids of the same age, all competing to be popular and "fit in" to current fads and mainstream, whatever it is perceived (or said) to be at the time. In other words, separated from our evolutionary roots, we are constantly shaping children in an artificial environment, created not for the purpose of group survival, but for the purpose of competition and/or sense of individual goals.

I'm not saying "artificial" is necessarily bad. I'm saying that modern culture and institutions have rarely been a direct result of our "intrinsic" or genetic character. (Back to what Belle's saying, hell, even breastfeeding in public has recently been a forbidden option for mothers! Wtf?)

"NO, property rights became a necessity when agrigulture and farming became the norm. There is nothing "genetic" about it." - Property rights revolve around scarce, important resources. Land become important after farming, so property of land evolved after that. But, even before, we exhibited property rights around other goods - animal hides, combs, spears etc.


What was poor and dysfunctional about Native American society? Didn't it become poor and dysfunctional with the arrival of the Europeans? And who should decide whether another society is poor and/or dysfunctional? Do we decide or do they? You talk about poverty and social functionality as though God handed them down as finished and eternal concepts.

When Pol Potnattempted to raise children in a communal basis, parents protested, eventually leading to a mass genocide.

Pissed off parents caused the Cambodian genocide? That's a new one. Can you actually document that?


That's a very Euro-centric view. I find it attractive, but it's also clearly just an opinion and not a fact.

Imagine a society without property rights. Let your imagination run wild - what do you see? An utopia or a hellhole? I see something out of the last Dark Knight movie.

I see Marxist scumbags 'occupying' my house and claiming that it is only 'fair' that they do so because they have been oppressed and I am the oppressor. The same will happen everywhere to everyone who is unable to defend themselves and their family. 

"What was poor and dysfunctional about Native American society?" - Why do you assume Native Americans did not have property rights? They may not have valued land as property. Property rights revolve around scarce, valuable resources. Native Americans may not have valued land, but they would have valued other goods and such valued goods would have come under the domain of private property rights.

Ayn Rand was a hackish writer of incredibly poor quality fiction that was little more than parables promoting a particular type of psychopathic behavior. While the Communist society  described in Anthem is intended to horrify any member of a modern industrial society, Well documented social structures have and continue to exist with no concept of property.

Just as Sigmund Freud tried to prove that all human behavior is motivated by sex, E.O. Wilson tried in a similar fashion to prove the idea of individual ownership ( property rights, capitalism) as the prime motivator. But Wilson's specialty was the study of ants.

The rationalization to the claim that ownership is  a genetic trait shows a lack of knowledge of developmental psychology.  It can be argued that property rights concepts are entirely learned, based on less convoluted reasoning

  Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are ideologies concerned with property rights and the extraction of rents, the main difference being in who gets the benefits of those rents.


Let's assume for a moment that what you say is true. It would seem that a lack of a concept of property doesn't make a society better or lend it any degree of survival value, If there are such societies, are they represented in the world economy? What countries in the UN have no concept of property?

While Ayn Rand is an easy target, there are some great advantages to having the concept of property:

Recognized private property rights provide the legal certainty necessary for individuals to commit resources to ventures. The threat of confiscation, by either private individuals or public officials, undermines confidence in market activity and limits investment possibilities.

Clear property rights tend to make decision makers pay close attention to resource use and the discounted value of the future employment of scarce resources. Absent private property rights, economic actors will tend to be short-sighted in their decision making and not conserve resources over time.

Property rights are the basis of exchange and the extension of ownership to capital goods provides the basis for the development of financial markets that are essential for economic growth and development.

Secure private property rights, as indicated in the above quote by Thomas Jefferson, is the basis for limited and civilized government. The elimination of arbitrary confiscation and the establishment of regular taxation at announced rates enables merchants to calculate the present value of investment decisions and pass judgment on alternative allocations of capital.  (source)

Property rights would seem to be a basic necessity for a civilization.

I don't want to shake your confidence in what you just wrote by doing what I am about to do, but:


Real Estate Property Rights make no sense for a nomadic people, yet I would say they had a civilization.



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