Steve Forbes Defends Capitalism in Lecture Hosted by CROWE

The editor-in-chief of Forbes harshly criticized socialism, Federal Reserve

Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine and former presidential candidate, recently spoke at the Wisconsin Historical Society about “how capitalism can save America.”

The event, which was co-hosted by the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy and Wisconsin Young Americans for Freedom, focused on the benefits of free markets and failures of centrally-planned economies.

Forbes warned that “Modern socialism is not the old kind of Marxist socialism where governments would own the means of production, as they would say. Modern socialists realize you don't have to own the things. You just regulate the things in finite detail, and that way you get control over, well, the economy.”

He emphasized that “nine out of ten people 200-plus years ago” lived in dire poverty, but it is “less than one in ten” today. Forbes argued that this reversal is because of the invention of modern capitalism.

“Progress before has been glacially slow, but a few, little over 200 years ago, it took off. The reason it took off was the liberation of individuals, starting in England and Holland, then in the United States and elsewhere.”

“The thing about free markets, capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is this that it is a moral system,” he said.

“How do you succeed in a free market? You succeed by meeting the needs and wants of other people. [...] You succeed by providing something that somebody else wants. So without you even knowing it, you're now interested in another person.”

Forbes said capitalism “brings about cooperation without you even realizing. You take something as seemingly simple as a restaurant. You assume farmers are going to produce the food. You assume that the food is going to be delivered, it's going to be perhaps processed. You will go to the restaurant, you assume there's going to be electricity, refrigerators, stoves, condiments and the like. All of this going into something as simple as serving a meal. Most people don't know the other individuals involved in that chain, but it is done without anyone in charge.”

He reasoned that most complaints about free markets are actually about “human nature.”

“People were doing bad things to each other, really, sometimes villainous things to each other, long before Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776.”

Forbes also touched on current events, such as the incoming “colossal collision between the new Trump administration and the Federal Reserve.”

He said the Fed is “a creature of Congress” that is “making big mistakes” and “using wrong economic models.”

Forbes also stated his belief that the 2017 Trump tax cuts will be renewed, and argued that “there's never been an economy that has taxed itself through prosperity.”

Wisconsin YAF and CROWE recently hosted Dr. Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, who had served as Chief Economist for the Council of Economic Advisors in the first Trump Administration.

At that event, Mulligan defended Donald Trump’s market-oriented economic policies, with the exception of tariffs, which he strongly criticized.