Incremental Change

Earlier I claimed that capitalism had the advantage that it was a much simpler system for evaluating government actions.  This is true, but we are faced with the task of evaluating impure forms of the various political ideals that have gained some popularity.  Politics always involves compromise and coalition building.  One question that some people might raise on this subject is whether making our economic incrementally more capitalistic would make it more simple.  More accurately we should ask whether an incremental change in the direction of capitalism would be easier to evaluate than other changes that people are likely to make.

I suspect that it is.  First, it is clear that any change in the system that involves nothing more than a reduction in government expenditure would be one that moves us toward a more capitalistic system.  Eliminating laws that don't conform to capitalistic principles is also quite easy to spot.  Capitalist principles are quite simple and don't require many pages of legislation to implement.  A very good approximation would be that any reduction in the total length of the law would be a step in the right direction.