04/05/07
I had friends who were socialists when I was young. I didn't discriminate. At some point, though, I took up discrimination.
The turning point was probably my trip to the bookstore to pick up a book I'd ordered. I was in my early twenties, but reading economic theory voraciously, for pleasure, as part of my ongoing philosophical pursuits. And a friend of mine came along with me. He liked books, too.
But the book I retrieved gave him a mild shock: Perception, Opportunity, and Profit, a collection of essays by Israel Kirzner.
He giggled, as was his wont, and chided, Oooh, evil; profit!
At first I thought he was being ironic. He was pillorying the inanities of socialism.
Since he was not a dunce, I had assumed he understood profit as a return on a certain type of trade. All people expect positive benefits to their actions. Otherwise, they'd do something else. That this would be controversial struck me then as it does now as silly at best. Perverse at worst.
But later that day I realized that not only was my friend flirting with Hinduism (a lapse in spirituality that I tried, at the time, not to think about), but also with socialism. He was, by nature, a leftist. And his leftism was not merely of the save the wilderness, save the dying children
sort; the kind I could admire, or at least share some goals. He actually did believe that profit was wrong.
And for the life of me, I couldn't see a reason to hang out with him any longer. If you believe that profit is evil, I don't really want to have much to do with you. You are either an idiot or a fool. I don't have friends who are idiots. And I'm trying to cut down on fools.
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