This post is to justify and expound upon the leap from the individual to the corporate – from “Love your neighbor as yourself” to Capitalism – that I made in The Just Society.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is not only a command, but a definition. What is love? It is not replacing your own interests with someone else’s (indeed we would not be human if our own interests could be displaced), but defining your own interests as coincident with someone else’s. It’s saying to someone, “I will take pleasure in your good. Your good will be my good.” – it’s taking pleasure in the good of your neighbor as you take pleasure in your own good. It is the opposite of hate, which is taking pleasure in someone’s harm for its own sake.

Love then is obviously an internal state of being. In this way, just as the law is an approximation of how an individual with love acts, justice is an approximation of how a society with love acts. One does not necessarily need love to abide by the letter of the law (the Pharisees, for example), nor does a society necessarily need any spiritually redeeming characteristics to exemplify justice. And like the law without love, justice without love does no spiritual or eternal good. Yet unlike the law, justice is nevertheless commanded for its own sake, with its own rewards and punishments.

If institutional justice is exemplified in Laissez-Faire Capitalism, it’s easy to see how it approximates the external signs of love.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of the Nations

Smith here in this famous quote corroborates everything said up to this point: that it is not necessary for any of these agents to have love for anyone else, yet they act as if they had love by serving their fellow man. Mises calls the principle “Consumer Sovereignty”, for in the Capitalist system, no man may advance his own interests except by meeting the needs and wants of his fellow man – by acting for what they perceive to be their good (of course the external fruits of love and the fruits of Capitalism may differ so far as consumers’ perceived good differs from their actual good). The interests of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker are not necessarily aligned out of holy love for each others’ good, but the external incentives of profit and loss nevertheless cause their interests to align.

Harmony of interests is the hallmark both of love and Capitalism, though it springs forth internally in the former and externally in the latter. The approximation of harmony is of course not always perfect in Capitalism. There exists, fairly or not, the stereotype of the miserly capitalist who begrudgingly serves his fellow consumers – one of old money reluctantly adapted to the new models of wealth. Feelings of entitlement are always the enemy of Capitalism, as if one could ever lay claim to a perpetual profit stream. As long as this entitlement does not impinge on the institutions of justice (which it unfortunately does frighteningly often through lobbying), the man who feels entitled to income without commensurate labor towards the satisfaction of his fellow men will be punished by the market and lose what he feels entitled to.

Not coincidentally, entitlement is also the enemy of love. Because entitlement is internal and Capitalism is a system of external incentives, these two can coexist, though one will dominate. But love and entitlement, being both internal, cannot coexist at all: entitlement completely spoils love. If I feel like I deserve someone else to count my interests equal to their own, that precludes the respect necessary to put that someone else’s interest on par with my own. Love must always be given freely and received in humility. Just as feelings of entitlement in the marketplace will cause one to lose the profit that accompanies the satisfaction of the needs and wants of consumers, entitlement in love will ruin the purity of that love.

The order of the market which arises under institutions of justice is itself the mechanism by which just societies are materially blessed for that justice. It is this order, the alignment and harmony of interests, the defining feature of Capitalism, which is both just by approximating love and the engine of economic prosperity.