After reading Johan Norberg’s book The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, I’ll admit to a substantial flood of satisfaction. I mean this wasn’t Ayn Rand, it was a kind of Ikea view of capitalism, but the message was quite clear. I’ve read other books by Johan Norberg and he’s pretty good for what I’d consider a lefty. He’s conservative by European standards, but in America, we have very different ideas of what a liberal is. But to Johan, a liberal means less restriction in market economies in a region that has always been about tyranny, the tyranny of the church, the tyranny of some maniacal king, or secret societies trying to undo everything in the background. The lunatic Karl Marx conceived in Europe the birthplace of socialism and communism. I would never have read the book if I hadn’t seen Elon Musk recommend it. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. I want him to do well with SpaceX. He makes a good car, but he’s not my idea of a good leader. But he is the richest person in the world, and I have thought it interesting to watch him grow his political perspective to accommodate his needs to move humanity into space and set up a colony on Mars. He has learned quite ostentatiously that a socialist Biden government with Barack Obama still whispering in his ear is never going to get Musk where he wants SpaceX to go. It takes too long to obtain permits, and the Department of Labor constantly harasses him because Musk doesn’t allow unionized labor to manage his manufacturing facilities. So Musk has evolved over time and seems to have fully embraced capitalism now in ways that are pace setting. There are a lot of very interesting observations in The Capitalist Manifesto that are quite delicious and well worth talking about. I think it may be one of the most important books of 2023, and it is undoubtedly impactful to the world’s current circumstances.

I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff for many years so the change in tone is not lost on me.  What The Capitalist Manifesto is by Norberg is a confession intended for liberals to read that undoes over a century of lunacy in following Karl Marx.  This is not a book intended for the MAGA crowd in America but the many socialists and communists around the world who still are trying to work The Communist Manifesto into political sustainability.  I remember how vicious that media, in general, was when I worked with the producers of the movie Atlas Shrugged to get the message out about their film version of the Ayn Rand books that were famous around the world but were labeled conspiracy theories of the radical right.  So this Johan Norberg confession is no small matter.  It wasn’t written for me or the fans of Ayn Rand, it was written to the college liberal, the Keynesian economist and the diabolical politician getting rich off the Swamp and all its globalist mechanisms.  Norberg has figured out something that the political left has been very slow to admit to: socialism of any kind doesn’t work.  And it was never going to work, and that capitalism, by free people, the freer, the better, is the key to unlocking the powers of any economy.  This is a CATO Institute view of the world that offers a flood of statistics to show just how much better the world is because of capitalism than it is under any other kind of authoritarian approach.  Norberg presents a dizzying display of real-world examples that everyone needs to come to grips with because we now have enough data to make some sobering judgments.

The Capitalist Manifesto was Norberg trying to explain to global liberals that if they want globalism and if they’re going to fight populism, they had better embrace capitalism and do it quickly.  He’s certainly no fan of President Trump, who he sees as a threat to the global order because he’s a nationalist who wants to close the borders of America to outside influence, to turn in instead of migrating out.  But the impact of financial systems driven by political sentiments couldn’t be more obvious.  This book was a white flag from the radical leftist points of view that capitalism was the only solution to global problems such as poverty.  There is no other economic approach that has improved the lives of so many, and as if to solidify critical opinion about capitalism, Johan Norberg cites many instances where Bernie Sanders and Karl Marx himself admitted that capitalism is the best and only way to approach economic theory.  And to argue against any notion that centralized planning does anything but harm people economically and is a background contributor to many of life’s many miseries.  This was a book attempting to capture the MAGA message of free markets in America and stamp liberalism to it as if it was their idea all along.  Again, Norberg has kind of an Ikea view of the world; I wouldn’t call Sweden a bastion of capitalism.  They only look that way because the rest of Europe has the heavy fog of communism and socialism hanging over it in such a devastating way.  America has an expectation of freedom that Europe does not have.  But to even say the word “capitalism” in Europe is taboo, similar to saying that your father has a mistress or that mom is wearing red panties under her white dress to church.  Nobody has been willing to admit these secrets in public until now. 

As I closed the book, I realized I had just read something that would set the tone for the next several decades.  It was a victory in many ways that the enemies of the world understood that they would never win against capitalism.  And that even liberal-minded people like Musk and Norberg, who are poster children for the World Economic Forum, or at least had been until the realities of populism rising around the world forced them to look in the mirror and give up on Marxism wholesale.  The Capitalist Manifesto is not an American book.  I tried to buy a copy at my local Barnes and Noble, but they didn’t have it.  The book ships out of the United Kingdom, so we’re not discussing an American product trying to explain capitalism’s values to the world.  This is coming from a European perspective, where socialism was born and raised to the detriment of most of the world.  Johan Norberg understands that only capitalism has worked to solve many of the problems that Democrats and their many versions regionally are concerned with.  The only way to help people is to find a way to put more money in their pockets that doesn’t involve the government stealing it from people who have made money and giving it to people who were too lazy to work for it.  I can’t recommend this book enough; it’s an avalanche of admissions that culture must embrace.  And within its pages, we can see the future, where liberals are finally going to get on the side of conservatives because they must.  They may even try to steal capitalism as their own, which would be expected of them.  But whatever the case, the world will change for the better as a result, and things will look a whole lot different economically, in a good way, in the decades to come because of the admissions in this book. 

Rich Hoffman