Capitalistic Irony

The Divine Tariffs of the Faithful vs. the Immaculate Laissez-Faire of the Pure

Oh, gather 'round, ye seekers of truth and prosperity, for we stand at the dawn of a philosophical cage match so gloriously absurd it could only have been scripted by a committee of mischievous angels with too much time on their hands. On one side, we have the Promethean Action crowd: a movement steeped in the ancient glow of Plato, Leibniz, Nicholas of Cusa, and Dante. These folks look at human creativity and say, with a straight face and a reverent whisper, "This spark? Divine inspiration, baby. Straight from the celestial tap." Faith-based to the core. They believe the soul of progress is touched by the hand of God Himself.

And yet—plot twist worthy of a divine comedy—these same heavenly devotees look at the gritty, this-worldly economic system of Alexander Hamilton and the American System and declare it not just good, but the gold standard. Tariffs? Industrial policy? National bank directing credit toward actual production, roads, canals, and manufacturing? Yes, please! They point to the 19th century, when America slapped 45% tariffs on imports, funded the government without an income tax, and birthed the greatest industrial explosion in human history. Fact-based success. Flesh-and-blood results. Factories humming, railroads snaking across the continent, a young nation telling the old empires to pound sand. The faithful are out here endorsing a capitalism that existed, worked spectacularly, and kept the lights on while protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of not-getting-colonized-again. Hallelujah and pass the protective duties!

Now, enter the Objectivists, stage left, clutching their copies of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal like sacred tablets handed down from a very rational Mount Sinai. These are the self-proclaimed champions of cold, hard, this-worldly reality. No faith for them! Everything must be grounded in observation. A is A. Reality is real. Man's mind is his tool of survival. Altruism is the root of all evil. They gaze upon the same history and... condemn the very system that built the powerhouse. Hamilton's tariffs? Statist interference! Industrial policy? Violation of individual rights! Government directing credit or owning so much as a paperclip? Heresy! In their view, the only moral capitalism is pure, unregulated laissez-faire—where government owns nothing, all support is voluntary, the economy and state are surgically separated, and every citizen floats in a beautiful bubble of non-coercion.

There's just one tiny, teensy, floating-abstraction-sized problem: Ayn Rand herself, high priestess of observation, openly admitted this paradise has never existed anywhere. Not once. Not in America, not in Britain, not in some libertarian Atlantis. Mixed economies everywhere. Elements of statism from the start. And yet, the pure doctrine demands we judge everything by this imaginary yardstick that reality stubbornly refuses to incarnate. The comedy writes itself, folks. The reality-based philosophers are out here insisting the economic system that didn't happen is the only righteous one, while the faith-based crew is waving around the one that did happen and turned a scrappy republic into a colossus.

Imagine the board meeting in the cosmos:

Angel 1: "Okay, for the reality-worshippers, let's give them a philosophy that scorns faith and demands empirical grounding."

Angel 2: "Brilliant. And their ideal system?"

Angel 1: "One that has never been observed in the wild. Perfect. Irony levels: critical."

Angel 2: "Now for the faith crew—make 'em all about divine creative fire."

Angel 1: "And their economics?"

Angel 2: "Hamilton. Tariffs. National improvements. Stuff that empirically worked for decades."

Angel 1: "Chef's kiss. They'll never see it coming."

The Objectivist looks at 19th-century America—tariffs funding the government, manufacturing booming, national security humming—and says, "Immoral! Too much government!" The Promethean looks at the same data and says, "Divine inspiration at work in the real world, through productive enterprise." One side reveres the unseen ideal; the other reveres the seen success. It's like watching a monk lecture an engineer on why the functioning bridge is spiritually impure while the blueprint for the bridge that exists only in Platonic heaven is the true path.

And the internal Objectivist civil wars? Chef's kiss again. Because when your political ideal has never existed, every real-world politician becomes a disappointing sinner. Support tariffs for national security against a hostile power shipping fentanyl and dominating supply chains? Statist! Suggest citizens might need to contribute (gasp) to the defense apparatus that protects their rights? Initiating force! Meanwhile, the Prometheans are over here saying, "Yeah, Hamilton built a system that let individuals flourish while the nation didn't get economically colonized by the British financial machine." One group has divine creativity plus working economics. The other has observed reality plus an economics that floats above it like a particularly principled cloud.

The laughter echoes through the ages. The faith-based movement is busy trying to resurrect a proven, this-worldly system that delivered unprecedented wealth and power. The observation-based movement is faithfully guarding a pure vision that, by its own founder's observation, has never been observed. In the great marketplace of ideas, one side is selling the factory that produced; the other is selling the ghost of the factory that never was.

Perhaps the ultimate punchline is this: both sides love individual rights, production, and reason in their way. But only one has noticed that reality already ran the experiment—and the results had tariffs. The comedy writes itself, indeed. And somewhere, Hamilton is chuckling while adjusting his protective duties.