1.5.2 State and Public Ownership: Conflict with Capitalism
At the root of the definition of capitalism is “private ownership.” In Merriam-Webster dictionary, capitalism is defined as “an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods.” Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, characterized capitalism as a working model of a society organized through voluntary exchange and free private enterprise exchange economy121. According to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, all property is privately owned under capitalism121. By the same token, economist George Reisman confirms the fact that capitalism is a social system based on private ownership122. Encyclopedia Britannica has the following definition: “capitalism, also called free market economy, or free enterprise economy: economic system, dominant in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means of production are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets.” Public or state ownership of the means of production such as auto industry or financial institutions is in direct conflict of the foundation of capitalism. The Chambers 21st Century Dictionary explicitly rejects state ownership in its definition of capitalism as “an economic system based on private, rather than state, ownership of businesses, factories, and transport services, etc., with free competition and profit-making.” The role of the state in a capitalist society is more applicable to regulations of industry than owning it. The fact that government intervention to own part of the industry may lead to the stabilization of a turbulent economy does not make this intervention a valid move from the perspective of capitalism. On the contrary, this reveals a notable defect in the theory of capitalism which allows only one form of ownership, that is, the private ownership.