Stötte häromdagen på en gammal klassiker som Ayn Rand rekommenderade. Nämligen Capitalism the Creator (1940) av Carl Snyder:

Who, and what, created this industry—so incredibly vast? Labor? In a sense, ”labor” contributed almost nothing. It did not invent the dynamo, which produces all this electric power. That was the work of an untutored bookbinder’s apprentice, who lives in fame as the greatest experimental genius of his age, and perhaps since Archi- medes. Nor did ‘labor’ make any serious contribution to develop it. To perfect and make practical this epochal invention required the genius and skill of three generations and more, of thousands of trained engineers and physicists, a brilliant line extending from Far- aday to Edison, Steinmetz, and Langmuir. Who paid for all this long travail of experimentation, and the salaries of all these technicians, involving the investment of tens of millions of dollars? Labor? No, it was Capital Savings; this, and this alone which has alike created this wondrous industry, and all our modern world of comfort, convenience, and luxury beside.

Lite längre fram:

. . . there is one way, and only one way, that any people, in all history, have ever risen from barbarism and poverty to affluence and culture; and that is by that concentrated and highly organized system of production and exchange which we call Capitalistic: one way, and one alone. Further, that it is solely by the accumulation (and concentration) of this Capital, and directly proportional to the amount of this accumulation, that the modern industrial nations have arisen: perhaps the sole way throughout the whole of eight or ten thousand years of economic history.

Och:

What our plaintive ‘modernists’ bewail as the ‘machine age’ is precisely that which gives the greatest promise of the future, the opening of the gates of opportunity to the whole mass of the population. Without the creation of this Wealth, unimaginable.

And this wealth is not, as almost all the earlier economists assumed, the product of ‘labor’; nine-tenths of it is directly the product of machines; these and these alone made possible the present day colossal aggregate of Capital. And in turn these machines were the product of brains and especial ability; quite literally a creation of genius, or of genii: inventors, contrivers, discoverers, enterprisers and accumulators—all conspiring in the economic wonder of today.

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