Inclined to Liberty: The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit

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“No one should be allowed to own a yacht.”

“The salaries of company executives are too high”

“No one should be allowed to inherit wealth.”

We are surrounded every day by anti-capitalist clichés’. We encounter them in casual conversation constantly among family, friends, and casual talks at the store or church, to say nothing of the media.

Famed investor and businessman Louis Carabini, the founder of Monex, has been hearing this all his life. He wrote this book to answer the critics of the free market in a way that they could understand and accept. His overriding theme is that all attacks on capitalism are an attack on liberty and the human spirit. His argument is that these attacks are futile. They backfire and don’t work to achieve socially desirable ends.

There are two ideological tendencies: to be inclined toward liberty (letting others live their lives in any peaceful way) or to be inclined toward mastery (permitting others live only as another sees fit).

The topics he deals with include all of the most familiar: income inequality, CEO pay, the need to redistribute wealth, the need for government to create jobs, the limits to growth, the need to tax some particular industry, the need to end inheritance, the problem of materialism and capitalism, the need for more money, the lure of democratic decision making, the problem of luxury, and many other such issues.

Carabini has a patience about his prose. He explains the economics. He explains the ethics. He explains the politics. And he always returns to the central theme of the human spirit. Every attack on capitalism masks the desire to rule others through force. It is a great theme in the history of classical liberal writing but Carabini brings it up to date for our times.

If you are vexed by anti-capitalists attacks all around you, this book provides vast amounts of intellectual ammunition to deal with it. It is also an excellent book to give someone who just can’t seem to understand the merit of economic liberty.


Summary: More than Inclined to liberty
Rating: 5

I could not find this book on Amazon.ca… It is a quite interesting book from the Mises Institute. The Author, Louis E. Carabini, does a profond insight on politics when he, for instance, discusses in Chapter 9 about The False Lure of Democracy, and in Chapter 28, about Karl Marx.

I like what the author cites in top of Chapter 9, from Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) : «It is more blessed to be wise in truth in face of opinion than to be wise in opinion in face of truth». Who knows these days what happened to Giordano Bruno ?

Chapter 28 on Marxism is in fact (because I was once a Marxist in my youth) right to the point. And the various so-called experiences to produce more from a planned economy, to satisfy the needs of all without any freedom of choice and private initiative and freedom to be able at least to say no, have proven to be totally deceiving. These «experiences» have cost many lives, millions of them, starvation, killings, the «killing fields». And Cuba is still going on (40 000 political assassinations, not including all the side effects of an oppressive regime). And others want to follow, like Chavez, etc. ! This is crazy.

The fine book by Louis Carabini is an essay against totalitarianism. But there is probably one point where I might disagree a bit and it is that freedom is certainly a state of mind, but that we cannot be free if there are others to enslave us. We must get rid of them and be able to see in various policies being proposed to us their marxist origin, their marxist and collectivist philosophy. This book will certainly help to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Freedom is not a Chicago game.