I. The Delusion of “Adjective Capitalism” versus The Reality of Propertarianism, Praxeology, and the Parasitic Anatomy of State InterventionismI. The Delusion of “Adjective Capitalism” versus The Reality of Propertarianism, Praxeology, and the Parasitic Anatomy of State Interventionism

In contemporary political and academic discourse, it has become fashionable to blame every socio-economic pathology caused by government intervention on the free market itself -simply by attaching a pejorative prefix to the word “capitalism.” “State capitalism,” “surveillance capitalism,” “wild capitalism,” “crony capitalism,” “vulture capitalism,” “techno-feudalist capitalism,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “woke capitalism,” “eco-capitalism,” “monopoly capitalism,” or “corporatist capitalism”... Anyone who regurgitates these and similar nonsensical concepts as if they were genuine systemic analyses is a purely useful idiot. This cohort not only fails to understand what capitalism is and how it works, but is also utterly incapable of comprehending what socialism -the actual problem they attempt to point to with these idiotic concepts- really is, and how its insistence on a centralized economy inevitably produces disasters. Indeed, if they possessed the foresight to understand this, they would instantly realize what sheer ignorance it is to prefix capitalism with such absurd adjectives. Every single one of these hyphenated monstrosities describes not a failure of free markets, but a predictable consequence of state interventionism corrupting voluntary human cooperation.

Just as it is a fact that anyone who truly learns economics cannot logically remain a socialist, it is equally crystal clear that one cannot speak of capitalism in a world dominated by states and their absolute interventionism. This is a vital and concrete truth that cannot be brushed aside with simple memes like “that wasn’t real socialism” or “that isn’t real capitalism.” From an analytical standpoint, socialism is any institutionalized aggression against private property and voluntary exchange; therefore, a mixed economy is merely socialism practiced by degrees. The order in which we live today has nothing whatsoever to do with a capitalist system; for there is not a single moment when you are not robbed by taxation and that covert, ghost tax called inflation, nor do you retain any exclusive right of disposal over your property. When the state demands an annual tribute in the form of property, income, and capital gains taxes, you are reduced from a sovereign owner to a mere tenant on the state’s plantation.

In fact, under the current statist status quo, even your body does not belong to you: when you exercise your freedom of expression, the state can come along under the most emotional, absurd pretexts, stretch the law as it sees fit, and lock you in a cell. Yet in a genuine capitalist order, there is nothing sacred other than property, free competition, and voluntary exchange. Their sole guardian is the steadfast, principled ethics of non-aggression (the Non-Aggression Principle) and self-defense. Rooted in the undeniable axiom of self-ownership, this ethical framework recognizes that every individual has an absolute moral claim over their own body and the previously unowned natural resources they transform through their labor. When property and the ethics of non-aggression reign supreme, monopolies of violence such as the state -along with the crony sycophants and monopolies clustered around it- find no fertile ground in which to spawn.

Comprehending these truths is fundamentally not difficult at all. However, because societies are constantly indoctrinated by the illusion of false comfort provided by the state, they have swallowed the lie that freedom is impossible. To shatter this conditioned helplessness, one must turn to the rigorous deductive science of praxeology -the logic of human action- which strips away the mystifications of state propaganda. Those who wish to break free from this mental paralysis should open and read Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action, Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, and see with their own eyes the realm of wild stupidity, conceptual confusion, and delusion in which they are forced to live.

II. Linguistic SubversionII. Linguistic Subversion

To liberate our minds from statist dogma, we must first examine the corrupted vocabulary we have inherited from our ideological adversaries. In truth, the word “Capitalism” is a distortive term invented by French socialists in the mid-18th and 19th centuries to caricature the emerging industrial order as a system of class exploitation. Using this concept mindlessly means directly laying the groundwork for communist economic theory and its determinist historical narrative. What socialists attempt to curse with this negative characterization is actually nothing other than plain “economics” and plain “commerce” -that is, the spontaneous order among individuals, the state of nature, voluntary exchange, decentralization, “innovism,” anarchism, and voluntarism.

Ludwig von Mises, while sweeping socialist and communist economics into the theoretical dustbin where it belongs with his brilliant explanations known in the literature as the Economic Calculation Problem, attempted a noble maneuver to claim and vindicate the concept of “Capitalism.” However, Mises’ optimism was far too generous for this colossal ship of fools who choose obedience over understanding. Today, due to entrenched obscurantism, disinformation, and manipulation, returning to the true roots of the word has unfortunately become impossible. Therefore, it is a historical necessity to replace the concept of Capitalism with “Propertarianism” -a term far more suited to technical terminology that unshakably establishes the foundation of everything through its very meaning. By placing “property” at the linguistic center, Propertarianism immediately clarifies that justice, order, and prosperity flow from clearly defined and strictly defended boundaries of private ownership. A similar smearing and conceptual manipulation has been perpetrated against “Anarcho-capitalism.” Without intending any disrespect to Murray Rothbard’s monumental legacy, the designation “Property and Market Anarchism,” distilled logically since Frédéric Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari, Lysander Spooner, and Auberon Herbert, is a far more explicit expression that hits the bullseye.

This semantic corruption was also never accidental; it was a deliberate strategy of ideological warfare. Socialists -as intellectual saboteurs like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse openly articulated- have always known deep down that their administrative monstrosities based on central planning were doomed to eternal failure, and thus they played the game of constantly manufacturing cultural hegemony to cover up their shortcomings. To this end, they attempted to capture the mechanism of “language” -the most ancient example of spontaneous order- with repressive and disinformation-driven motives; naturally, the word “capitalism” is an archaic and typical product of these manipulative endeavors. If we wish not to indulge their linguistic games and instead be taken seriously on a global scale without being smeared, we must adopt these correct conceptual choices laid before us.

Indeed, the historical trajectory of the socialist movement reveals a total retreat from economic science into pure emotional and linguistic manipulation. Today’s socialists can no longer defend the fallacy that socialism will produce more wealth than the free market, as their predecessors once did. Instead, they assert that only socialism can deliver that “minimal wealth” which they claim is supposedly essential due to the fallacies of climate change and environmental crises. Having lost the debate over human flourishing, they now preach the gospel of managed scarcity and ascetic degrowth. At this point, socialism has ceased to be an economic theory and has devolved into a hollow rhetoric consisting of vague humanism and aesthetic whining. Precisely because of this, they have all taken refuge in, or infested, linguistics, the social sciences, postmodern philosophy, identity politics, and the disgrace known as contemporary art and postmodern literature -fields brimming with obscurantist, mystical, dogmatic, and tragicomic side branches. I’ll explain this in a bit more detail.

III. A Priori Impossibility of SocialismIII. A Priori Impossibility of Socialism

The intellectual turning point that forced socialists to abandon hard economics was delivered by the dean of the Austrian School, Ludwig von Mises. In 1920, Mises made one of the greatest contributions to economic science by proving a priori that the prices of all factors of production cannot be determined through the coercion of central planning, rendering socialism theoretically impossible to implement. Indeed, in a functioning market economy, market prices, profit and loss signals, and capital and income accounting are the sole tools enabling the rational allocation of scarce, versatile resources toward meeting society’s most urgent wants. Because capital goods and labor are heterogeneous and can be combined in countless ways, entrepreneurs require a common denominator -monetary prices born of genuine market exchange- to compare the opportunity costs of competing production methods. Thus, the prices of consumer goods are determined by the subjective valuations of consumers. The prices of the factors of production, in turn, emerge indirectly through entrepreneurial bids based on anticipating future consumer demand. Consequently, profit and loss are entirely the result of success or failure in adapting production to the desires of consumers. The profit-seeking entrepreneur necessarily redirects resources from less desirable uses to those more highly demanded; that is to say, absolute consumer sovereignty reigns over the market.

Socialism, by its very nature, aims to abolish private property in the means of production, thereby making the establishment of a free market for producer goods impossible. Without private owners buying and selling capital goods at their own risk, no genuine exchange ratios can emerge. In an environment devoid of prices, monetary economic calculation is a fantasy. The only calculation possible under a socialist regime is calculation in terms of physical output (calculation in kind). Yet such calculations lack any qualitative criterion of preference; they cannot distinguish which resource employment is more urgent or important than another. A central planner may know that a bridge can be built using either steel or reinforced concrete, but without market prices reflecting subjective scarcity and alternative uses across the entire economy, the planner is flying completely blind. The result is total chaotic resource waste and blinding uncertainty. Socialist planners can never gauge the relative importance of inputs and outputs, nor can they ever know what consumers want. While this theoretical analysis rests upon unshakable logic at the a priori level, the Soviet Russian experiment of 1918-1921 (Total War and Red Terror Communism) stands as the bloody and concrete manifestation of the theory in action. Both Lenin and Stalin executed the unadulterated Marxist program to the letter, resulting in mass-extinguishing famine, misery, and unimaginable social devastation.

IV. Fiat Money, Taxation, and the “Greater Good” Idol as The Organs of MafiaIV. Fiat Money, Taxation, and the “Greater Good” Idol as The Organs of Mafia

Although few modern regimes dare to replicate the total overnight abolition of money seen under Soviet War Communism, today’s states operate on the exact same predatory principles through institutional extortion and monetary debasement. For those who still do not understand, let me summarize it in the simplest possible terms: The entire state apparatus is a colossal, organized mafia that launders the tax revenues extracted from you and me back to its own cliques through so-called social welfare, humanitarian foreign aid, and endless wars. The core premise of this mafioso structure is this: “Human beings are inherently criminal by nature, and this condition can only be restrained by allowing another, more organized criminal gang to rule over everyone, plan all production processes, and intervene in all processes of interaction, exchange, and savings.” The glaring logical contradiction of this statist myth is self-evident: if human beings are too corrupt to govern themselves voluntarily, how do those very same human beings magically become infallible angels the moment they are handed a monopoly on coercion?

This fictional control mechanism functions as follows: You sweat blood for a medium of exchange (money) to sustain your life, while states print that money out of thin air without backing. Thus, they feloniously usurp the purchasing power of the money in your pocket while transferring newly created wealth directly to the state itself and its privileged financial cronies—a legalized plunder known in economics as the Cantillon Effect. Then, for the so-called “security” service provided by their immense monopoly on violence, they seize a portion of your remaining money under the label of taxation. Finally, in the schools they run with their own curriculum, they engrave into your mind the lie that without them, society would collapse into chaos. Mafioso despots always reward their obedient slaves with more oppression, more stupidity, and more dishonor.

Furthermore, how can you call an order “capitalism” in which the state -as we have repeatedly witnessed in the recent past- disregards individual autonomy to institutionalize bodily violations on a massive scale, bans production, shuts down businesses, and confines people to their homes? If you defend a system in which your most fundamental freedoms are tethered to consuming the products of giant pharmaceutical companies fed off the backs of taxpayers and shielded by the legal armor of the state, you are not a liberal, a humanist, a conservative, or a patriot. Such state-enforced corporate cartels are the exact antithesis of free-market enterprise. There is only one concept -composed of synonymous terms- that defines you, and that is “parasite socialist!”

Behind every such assault on bodily and economic autonomy lies a collectivist moral fallacy. Anyone who presumes the right to dictate how others ought to live -whether cloaked in the mask of “society” or not- has carved out a synthetic idol called the “greater good” and knelt down to worship it. Yet there is no social good higher than the “individual,” the primary element without whom society cannot exist. Of all tyrannies, the one exercised “for the public good” is the most primitive and destructive. Emotionally raw and primitive fools believe that any form of tyranny is ethical as long as it is dressed up as the “common good.” And anyone who demands that others sacrifice themselves to a fake god deserves nothing but contempt and disdain. A state that does not respect the individual autonomy of its citizens has forfeited its reason for being and its social legitimacy. Consequently, every single state today, without exception, is nothing more than a parasitic criminal organization.

The survival of this criminal enterprise relies entirely on a double standard of morality that exempts state agents from the universal laws of justice. While private individuals who manipulate markets are sentenced to rot in prison for years, politicians who turn those very markets into battlefields through their shortsighted interventions are cheered, re-elected, and rewarded with absurd salaries sufficient to feed their seven generations. When a gang member extorts your property, it is called “theft”; when the mafia commits premeditated murder, it is called “homicide.” But when a politician orders the exact same acts, it is branded as “public interest,” “state duty,” or “social policy.” As Mises eloquently stated in his work Bureaucracy: “Most tyrants, despots, and dictators are sincerely convinced that their rule is beneficial to the people.”

V. Time Preference, the Civilizing Process, and the Defense of the Property CovenantV. Time Preference, the Civilizing Process, and the Defense of the Property Covenant

Beyond its immediate moral bankruptcy, state interventionism actively destroys the intertemporal foundations of human civilization. In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe demonstrates that a low time preference -which enables savings and capital accumulation- initiates the “civilizing process.” Time preference refers to the universal human tendency to prefer present satisfaction over future satisfaction; when individuals cultivate foresight and restraint (low time preference), they defer immediate consumption to invest in durable capital goods and long-term projects. Low time preference enhances capital accumulation and market capabilities; this, in turn, deepens the division of labor, creating a positive feedback loop that raises the quality of life and extends average life expectancy. As long as self-ownership, the absoluteness of private property, and the derivative freedom of association and disassociation are respected, this civilizing process continues uninterrupted. The state, however, by continuously and permanently violating property rights, acts as a reactionary force that literally “retards society from civilization” by penalizing thrift, rewarding short-sighted consumption, and artificially raising social time preference. When most people speak of the free market, they mean merely unhindered competition. Yet a more inclusive definition encompasses any voluntary economic and social activity that is not controlled by a coercive public monopoly. Free competition between individuals and enterprises is the main artery nourishing innovation and productive efficiency. But the bureaucratic obstacles imposed under the guise of regulation by the extortionist organization known as the state gradually kill off this dynamic structure of the market, plunging society into an endless vortex of stagflation.

The greatest evils committed throughout history have always been actions claimed to be done “for our own good,” deriving their legitimacy from the crude coercion of the majority. The individual who minds their own business without forcing anyone is the person who does the greatest good for humanity. For every rational action is, at its core, an individual action. Only the individual thinks, only the individual reasons, and only the individual acts. Because “society” is not a super-organism with a mind of its own, order in a free society must be anchored by real, acting property owners. The task of maintaining the property covenant in a libertarian (individualist propertarian) community belongs primarily to the property owner. However, since it is impossible for a single individual to bear this burden alone, the property owner requires the support of the community’s natural elites -that is, the heads of households and businesses that contribute the most to production and achieve their social authority entirely through voluntary recognition rather than coercive privilege. To protect this social order, two fundamental defensive mechanisms are essential:

1. Physical Defense: Exercising legitimate physical force and restitution/punishment mechanisms against external invaders and internal criminals who directly initiate aggression against person or property.
2. Social Exclusion: Applying measures of disassociation, social boycott, and ultimately covenantal ostracism or expulsion from private property against individuals who advocate, advertise, or propagate ideas aimed at destroying property and the institution of the family.

At this point, every free community faces a twin, interconnected threat: Egalitarianism and Cultural Relativism. Egalitarianism, in every form, is hostile to the idea of private property; for private property, by its very nature, entails exclusivity, natural inequality, and discrimination regarding who may or may not access a scarce resource. Cultural relativism, on the other hand, is incompatible with intergenerational kinship and the structure of the family; for the family structure necessitates a cultural absolutism rooted in parental authority, moral hierarchy, and the transmission of capital and values across generations.

As a socio-psychological reality, both egalitarian and relativist superficial sentiments find fertile ground among undeveloped adolescents. These youths, lacking mental maturity, tend to rebel against parental authority and discipline. While cultural relativism provides the ideological cover for escaping family discipline, childish egalitarianism -resting on the naive notion that property is “given as a given” rather than produced- supplies the pseudo-intellectual foundation for rebellious youths to stake claims over economic resources without expending any labor. The welfare-warfare state actively exploits and subsidizes this entitled-adolescent pathology, severing the natural bonds of the family so that atomized individuals become permanently dependent on the state apparatus.

VI. Production versus Plunder i.e. The Political Means and Marx’s Ten Planks in Plain SightVI. Production versus Plunder i.e. The Political Means and Marx’s Ten Planks in Plain Sight

Thus, Freedom and its economic system, Capitalism (Propertarianism), breathe only in areas devoid of state intervention and indoctrination. Freedom means being free from government coercion, the total dismantling of its arbitrary powers, and the right of individuals to pursue their own chosen path. Any individual or institution that attacks or seizes another’s property, or meddles in voluntary exchanges that involve no aggression violating self-ownership, fundamentally contradicts their own existential nature as a human being. For man can live honorably only through his own production and the exchange of that production by voluntary consent. The aggressor, on the other hand, is not a producer, but a parasitic predator seeking to feed and consolidate power off the labor of others.

Parasitism -or socialism, which the unqualified majority falsely touts as capitalism- can never be a universal ethic; for a parasite to sustain its life, it requires non-parasitic producer hosts. Even from a strictly formal ethical standpoint, an ethic of expropriation fails the test of universalizability: if everyone were to abandon production for plunder, humanity would perish instantly. As aggression and extortion increase, the producing population and total output diminish. In a scenario where the host is depleted and dies, the parasite is inevitably doomed to perish alongside it. Whether in the example of Robinson Crusoe and Friday on a single island or in today’s complex global society, forced exploitation and parasitism do not merely destroy the victim’s existence; they also corrupt the very nature of the aggressor who chooses to seize another’s labor rather than transform nature through his own reason. At the end of the day, the aggressor inflicts irreparable damage upon his own humanity just as much as he harms his unfortunate victim. Since the state necessarily and inevitably lives by seizing individual capital, and since its growth and expansion depend by definition on ever-greater interventions and attacks against private individuals and private enterprise, one must conclude that the state is, by its very nature, profoundly “anti-capitalist.”

We are now in a better position to answer the question: “What are Socialism (the state and its parasitic sycophancy) and Capitalism (the individual and their freedom of voluntary exchange)?” In his sociological masterpiece The State, the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer drew a definitive line between the two ways of acquiring wealth: the “economic means” (production and voluntary exchange) and the “political means” (the unrequited seizure of others’ goods and labor). The state, in the words of Franz Oppenheimer, is “the organization of the political means” -that is, the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. Private crime occurs sporadically and uncertainly; ordinary parasitism is short-lived, and forced parasitism can always be halted by the legitimate self-defense of its victims. The state and socialism, on the other hand, provide a legal, orderly, and systematic channel for the pillaging of private property, offering the parasitic class in that society a guaranteed, secure, and relatively “peaceful” lifeline.

Since production always precedes plunder, the free market also precedes the state and socialism. You cannot rob what has not first been produced. The state was never created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm is a conquering tribe that ceases its time-honored practice of plundering and killing another tribe outright, instead permitting the conquered tribe to live and produce in exchange for a permanent annual tribute, in order to lengthen the duration of spoliation, make it more secure, and attain a more peaceful environment for continuous extraction. Confusing this state of affairs with capitalism or any alleged variant thereof is the height of sheer stupidity.

If, despite all this, you still insist on the shameless depravity of screening the problems caused by socialism across today’s world in favor of socialism by calling them “such-and-such capitalism,” or unwittingly playing the useful idiot, at least make the effort to read Karl Marx’s “Socialist Plan in 10 Steps” from The Communist Manifesto of 1848 -as analyzed in detail by Professor Antony P. Mueller at the Mises Institute (Democratic Socialism and Regular Socialism Have the Same Goal)- and compare it with what we are experiencing today:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes (realized today through property taxes, eminent domain, and zoning mandates).
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax (the cornerstone of every modern welfare-warfare state).
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance (implemented via estate and inheritance taxes that penalize intergenerational capital accumulation).
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels (enforced today through civil asset forfeiture, exit taxes, and financial sanctions against dissidents).
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly (fully realized through the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the global fiat central banking cartel).
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state (executed through state highway monopolies, aviation regulators, and state-censored telecommunications frameworks).
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, and the cultivation and improvement of the soil in accordance with a common plan (seen in endless industrial subsidies, agricultural quotas, and green-energy central planning).
8. Equal liability of all to work and the establishment of industrial armies (manifested in compulsory military or national service and state-managed labor codes).
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries and the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace (pursued through regional planning boards and urban-agenda directives).
10. Free education for all children in public schools and the combination of education with industrial production (the state’s compulsory public schooling monopoly, designed to mold obedient taxpayers and compliant regime subjects).

When you look at the world around you and see central banks inflating the currency, progressive taxation plundering earners, regulatory agencies cartelizing industry, and public schools indoctrinating the youth, you are not looking at “late-stage capitalism” or “crony capitalism” -you are looking at the triumph of Karl Marx’s ten-point socialist program operating under a deceitful alias. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯