Capitalism doesn't care about those who are down and out. It just crushes them.
Wrong! But that can be said to be true about socialism (or "progressivism")...
The man who works from himself outwards, whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things more happiness to others (if that is the great object of life) than a moral Don Quixote who is always loable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors...[A] man who has a disinterested love for the human race-that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind-is an unaccountable person...capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against man in particular
-James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-C.S. Lewis
I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world...
I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.
Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…
The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
Can you say "soft tyranny"?
