Advocates of free-market capitalism often note that this ordering of society does not seek to change imperfect human nature but rather channel it constructively. A short and honest parable about how this might look in the real world, could be illustrative:
Imagine a man born without the faintest flicker of empathy. Call him “John Dao”.
Dao feels no joy at a child’s laugh, no sadness at a widow’s tears, and no pity for another’s fall. His world is one of cold calculation. Others are merely instruments, obstacles, or resources to him. He is a psychopath: high-functioning, intelligent, and utterly self-interested.
In most societies throughout history, such a man would have sought the throne, pulpit, or presidential palace. Power through political coercion has always been the surest path for those who view humanity as raw material.
Dao, growing up sharp-eyed and ambitious in a middling democracy, initially plotted the same course, joining student politics and networking with politicos. But he soon had to confront the inconvenient reality of his own lack of charisma, his grating voice, and his severe face. He could not seduce crowds or inspire adulation. The television age and its successor, the social media age, rewarded performers.
John Dao was a strategist, not a performer.
A pivot
So, he had to pivot.
If he could not rule men by law and force, he would rule them by ensnaring them in his corporate empire. He entered business.
Dao built an empire not by dreaming of curing disease for the betterment of humanity, but by dreaming of immortality for himself, and the unimaginable wealth and influence that would confer.
Aging, that universal tax on his potential, became the target.
He had no medical training, but he possessed the cold ability to identify genius, marshal it, squeeze every drop of productivity from it, and to fire without remorse those who failed to deliver. He founded a medical research company, secured investors, poached the world’s most brilliant scientists and doctors with terrifying performance targets, and set them to work on slowing cellular senescence.
Decades later, they succeeded beyond expectation: the company delivered a reliable, repeatable treatment that could slow biological aging by roughly 50 years.
A 40-year-old could reasonably expect to reach the physical equivalent of age 60 at chronological age 110. The treatment was expensive at first, then, as scale and competition kicked in, prices fell. Millions took it. Life expectancy charts bent sharply upward.
John Dao had initially imagined something far more cinematic: a secluded laboratory where brilliant minds worked solely for his personal immortality. But reality quickly disabused him of this fantasy.
Even with his considerable early capital, he needed more investment. And investors – some coldly psychopathic like himself, others merely greedy – demanded evidence that this was not a vanity project but a scalable enterprise. They wanted proof of concept that the technology could generate returns on a massive scale. A treatment sold once to their elite brethren – the handful of billionaires and trillionaires that the left reminds us are hoarding more of the world’s wealth – would never suffice.
The only sustainable goal with this product was to get as many people around the world as possible to use it, if for no reason other than the expectation that the new cohort of people over the age of 100 will be in need of further medical treatments.
The market forced his hand
Thus, the market, that impersonal and unforgiving mechanism, forced Dao’s hand. What began as a quest for his own extended lifespan became a product engineered for general consumption: The therapy had to be manufacturable at scale, distributable, and desirable to the broad middle class and eventually even the working poor as costs fell.
The same psychopathic drive for dominance that defined Dao, now compelled him and his backers to democratise longevity. The masses were not charity cases, but the necessary pawns of sustained profit. In pursuing his own godlike longevity and power, Dao was structurally required to extend life for ordinary people as well.
As is to be expected, John Dao became the wealthiest individual in history: He commanded thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of contractors.
Like clockwork, “progressive” NGOs decried his influence. Commentators on the left called him a parasite, a modern robber baron, a man whose fortune proved the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. “This is grotesque,” they wrote. “John Dao is the world’s first two-trillionaire! His wealth alone could stop world hunger if we just redistributed it. He doesn’t care about humanity – only his bottom line!”
Some demanded nationalisation of the technology or windfall taxes.
They were right about one thing: Dao did not care about humanity. Every decision was calibrated to his own power, wealth, and security. The suffering of a single employee meant nothing to him if it advanced the share price. The joy of a grandmother seeing her great-grandchildren reach adulthood was, to him, merely a useful marketing datum.
And yet!
Unimaginable alternative
Under a different system – one that placed fewer barriers between ambition and coercive political power – John Dao would almost certainly have gone into politics. He would have risen through patronage networks, mastered bureaucratic intrigue, and eventually wielded the state’s monopoly on violence.
Imagine Premier and Chairman Dao.
Imagine the regulations written to entrench his allies, the taxes calibrated to crush competitors, the security apparatus turned against journalists and dissidents who exposed his corruption.
The body count, direct and indirect, would have been measured in the thousands or millions, as it has been for countless charismatic sociopaths and psychopaths who seized state power throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Dao’s lack of empathy would have been a feature, not a bug, in the game of authoritarian or even democratic conquest.
Instead, under capitalism, Dao had no lawful coercive authority. He could not conscript scientists. He could not tax citizens to fund his experiments. He could not jail rivals. The only way for him to amass his fortune was to offer something so valuable that hundreds of discerning investors and then millions of free individuals, acting in their own self-interest, voluntarily handed over their money.
He had to please consumers again and again. He had to out-innovate competitors who wanted the same wealth and status he craved. The market, that relentless, true democratic mechanism of consumer sovereignty, forced the psychopath to become an unintentional benefactor.
A medical revolution that no “compassionate” central planner, no “empathetic” bureaucrat, no “saintly” public servant had delivered at anything like this speed or scale, is the result.
Humanity gained 50 years of invention, art, family, and memories.
Channelling energies productively
The man who would have been a humanitarian disaster in politics became one of the most consequential creators in medical history, not despite his psychopathy, but because the system of capitalism channelled it.
This is the genius of the free market.
It does not require saints. It does not demand that men become altruistic. It takes human nature as it is – greedy, competitive, status-seeking – and places it within an institutional framework where the only path to great success is to make others better off.
The psychopath who wants palaces must first build hospitals people willingly pay to enter. The narcissist who craves adulation must first deliver smartphones, software, or extended lifespans that improve billions of lived experiences. Even the sociopath must, in the end, serve.
Critics will sneer that John Dao remains a bad man. And he does.
He may treat his staff cruelly. He may discard lovers like used tissues. These are moral failings, and voluntary association, contract law, and reputation offer only partial restraints. But compare those private sins to the public atrocities enabled by state power in the hands of similarly disordered personalities.
The difference is measured in orders of magnitude.
One man’s boardroom tyranny affects thousands. A dictator’s psychopathy can immiserate civilisations.
Capitalism’s great moral innovation is not that it makes men good. It is that it makes the bad man’s ambition useful. As the great FA von Hayek wrote:
“However that may be, the main point about which there can be little doubt is that [Adam] Smith’s chief concern was not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst. It would scarcely be too much to claim that the main merit of the individualism which he and his contemporaries advocated is that it is a system under which bad men can do least harm. It is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent and more often stupid.”
Capitalism civilises the savage within us not by pretending it does not exist, but by giving it productive and constructive work to do. John Dao wanted godlike power. The market did not condescend to him or try to book him into a sensitivity training course. It replied: “Alright. The only way to get what you want is to give the rest of us half a century more of life.”
We should be grateful for institutions structured by nature to channel monsters into miracles, when the alternative is monsters with guns, flags, and ministries.
Reality check
No one has yet cracked the code for extending healthy human lifespan by 50 years. But when that breakthrough finally arrives, readers should harbour no illusions about its origin.
It will not emerge from the idealised socialist commune where supposedly altruistic individuals sacrifice their own interests for the collective good. It will not be delivered by the ostensibly noble democratic politician whose horizon barely extends beyond the next four- or five-year electoral cycle, knowing full well that a project spanning decades offers no immediate political payoff. Nor will it come from the benevolent dictator who, unburdened by term limits, spends his days consolidating power and erecting barriers trying to keep the best medical minds from fleeing towards freer shores.
This civilisation-changing innovation, when it does come, will be driven, as it always has been, by self-interested, ambitious entrepreneurs – many possessing at least a streak of psychopathy, grandiosity, and relentless hunger for wealth and status.
Only under the harsh discipline of profit and loss, where consumer sovereignty reigns and voluntary exchange is the sole path to success, will such minds pour decades of capital and effort into conquering aging.
The market does not require them to love humanity. It merely requires them to serve it.
Politics comes through the backdoor
But that is not the end of the story. The commercial success of someone like John Dao is never cleanly severed from the parasitical politics of society.
The same political establishment that had once quietly dismissed Dao for his grating voice, uncharismatic demeanour, and severe features, now comes courting.
Senators, ministers, and party operatives will arrive at his offices with outstretched hands: Campaign donations were welcome, and in return, they offer regulatory tweaks, accelerated approvals, subsidies, and barriers against nimble competitors.
Dao, ever the strategist without principle, might even approach them first.
The transaction is mutually beneficial: they need his money and influence; he needs their coercive machinery to protect and expand his empire.
Here the story reveals the crucial normative dimension.
Economic capitalism is incomplete without political capitalism – what we call liberalism. Liberalism insists on a high and thick wall of separation between economy and state.
It celebrates capitalism’s ability to channel base human traits, even psychopathic ambition, into productive outcomes. But it refuses to allow that success to purchase political power.
Dao may have given the world 50 extra years of life through the discipline of the market, but liberalism demands he must never be granted – directly or indirectly – the state’s monopoly on violence as a prize. He remains a private actor, however wealthy and influential.
It is precisely the left and the socialists who erode this separation.
By expanding the state’s reach into every corner of economic life – through licensing, subsidies, price controls, and industrial policy – they create the very structures that invite men like Dao to cross the line.
What begins as a clean market triumph becomes cronyism dressed in progressive rhetoric. The very same voices who decry John Dao’s fortune as immoral, are the ones building the bridge that could transform him from a beneficial if cold-hearted innovator into something far more dangerous: Premier and Chairman Dao, armed with the power of lawful coercion.
Only by embracing economic capitalism, stern political liberalism, and the third element of the institution triumvirate of a free society – jurisprudential constitutionalism – can we keep the psychopath productive rather than predatory. The market civilises him, and the state must not empower him.
Communitarian spirit
Some readers familiar with my earlier writing might detect a tension.
A few months ago, in these pages, I warned that a capitalism divorced from a basic humanitarian consciousness – of the fact consumers and customers are also flesh-and-blood human beings – becomes a cold institution.
As I noted then: Even this flawed, hyper-“efficient” variant still delivers the best times humanity has ever experienced, but it necessarily invites ignorant-though-understandable opposition.
This column does not retreat from that sentiment.
A pure psychopathic capitalism, stripped of all human warmth, remains obviously inferior to a richer, more humane commercial order that understands the complementary roles that commerce and community play, while preserving voluntary exchange.
But the parable of John Dao’s success shows that even cold, self-interested ambition, when disciplined by the market and barred from state power, produces miracles. As AI technologies continues to develop – and it should be embraced, as I and many others have – it will propel us to solving age-old problems… but only within a free system.
Non-communitarian capitalism is still vastly superior to the best conceivable versions of socialism or so-called developmental statism, though the fullest expression of liberalism pairs economic dynamism with a cultural recognition that commerce serves living, breathing people, and not merely abstract “efficiency”.
The left would look at John Dao’s fortune and see injustice.
I would see the additional decades granted to ordinary people as one of the clearest vindications of the free society. A psychopath set out to rule the world, and capitalism made him improve it instead.
That is not a bug, an accidental mercy of “dog-eat-dog” capitalism. It is a feature, built into the very fabric of free-market liberalism, that has dragged us out of the muck and will soon yet carry us to greater achievements.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/the-new-york-stock-exchange-building-exterior-8878493/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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