Inclined To Liberty: The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit

“No one should be allowed to own a yacht.”

“The salaries of company executives are too high”

“No one should be allowed to inherit wealth.”

We are surrounded every day by anti-capitalist clichés. We encounter them in casual conversation constantly among family, friends, and casual talks at the store or church, to say nothing of the media.

Famed investor and businessman Louis Carabini, the founder of Monex, has been hearing this all his life. He wrote this book to answer the critics of the free market in a way that they could understand and accept. His overriding theme is that all attacks on capitalism are an attack on liberty and the human spirit. His argument is that these attacks are futile. They backfire and don’t work to achieve socially desirable ends.

There are two ideological tendencies: to be inclined toward liberty (letting others live their lives in any peaceful way) or to be inclined toward mastery (permitting others to live only as another sees fit).

The topics he deals with include all of the most familiar: income inequality, CEO pay, the need to redistribute wealth, the need for government to create jobs, the limits to growth, the need to tax some particular industry, the need to end inheritance, the problem of materialism and capitalism, the need for more money, the lure of democratic decision making, the problem of luxury, and many other such issues.

Carabini has a patience about his prose. He explains the economics. He explains the ethics. He explains the politics. And he always returns to the central theme of the human spirit. Every attack on capitalism masks the desire to rule others through force. It is a great theme in the history of classical liberal writing but Carabini brings it up to date for our times.

If you are vexed by anti-capitalists attacks all around you, this book provides vast amounts of intellectual ammunition to deal with it. It is also an excellent book to give someone who just can’t seem to understand the merit of economic liberty.