Yet, in charging that Enron's fall has exposed the corruption inherent in the American economy, these commentators obfuscate the nature of what free-market capitalism truly is.

Dictionary.com defines capitalism as "an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."

Most Americans see capitalism the same way. The leftist commentators add that capitalism also involves corporations exploiting workers, consumers and the environment, while they avoid punishment by paying government regulators to look in the other direction.

In actuality, free-market capitalism really means the sociopolitical-economic system in which individual rights to life, liberty and property are respected, protected by the government, and all of the logical consequences of that arrangement. That means that all forms of nonconsensual violence, fraud and the threat thereof against persons or their property are illegal. Thus, the government steps in to prevent murder, theft, rape, bodily harm, property damage, financial deceit and breach of contract, and butts out in almost all other cases.

Commercial activity is not the purpose but only a corollary of capitalist politics, as it leaves individuals free to trade and secure their own property (including their own bodies), knowing that, if these rights are threatened by a modern Attila the Hun, the government will try to protect these rights and leave people alone the rest of the time.

To this, leftists reply that this is a self-contradiction, since they believe corporate executives violate individual property rights more often than not. But even if this were not a bigoted stereotype, their claims against capitalism still wouldn't be justified, because capitalism is based upon individual rights being respected, and not on whether the system is dominated by wealthy businesspeople.

For instance, the leftists contend that capitalism is fueled by corporations going into Third World countries and outright stealing natural resources from indigenous peoples. But even if such occurrences were as common as the leftists would like people to believe, they wouldn't be examples of capitalism anyway, but of the Third-World government's failure to properly recognize the institution of capitalist private property.

Under capitalism, the indigenous person would have the ownership of the land he lives on, and he could say to any corporation using it, "This land is my private capitalist property, so you can't just take minerals or plants from it without my consent. Either you stop taking my belongings, or you financially make this worth my while."

In essence, consistently applied capitalism is not the cause of exploitation of Third World peoples, but the solution to it.

Any time anyone violates a right to life, liberty or property, it is not an act of capitalism, but a violation of capitalism, regardless if the perpetrator is rich. A corporate executive who steals is not a capitalist but an anti-capitalist.

A poor janitor who works for his money, with the full consent of his employer, is a capitalist. A billionaire who earned his wealth by selling a product that consumers willingly gave him money for, is a capitalist. A billionaire who gained his wealth through stealing or murder, such as someone like Al Capone, is not a capitalist.

This rule even applies to cases in which the U.S. government itself uses its own monopoly on the legal use of force to lawfully violate private property rights on behalf of a corporation. In Hawaii, the Outrigger Corporation is being an anti-capitalist in asking the state government to use eminent domain laws to steal privately owned land, which it plans to later appropriate.

Similarly, Donald Trump's behavior is anti-capitalist when he asks the Atlantic City government to condemn privately-owned apartment buildings just so that he can later purchase the land they sit on from the city for below the market price.

Insofar as any businessperson uses force or fraud on others to stay in business, he is an anti-capitalist. Conversely, to the extent that he earns money through voluntary trade, without violating any rights, he is a pro-capitalist.

Thus, free-market capitalism can never fail as long as people still understand the importance of individual rights. That is worth remembering as one reads the usual left-biased headlines.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com

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