Justice & Law Quote by George Reisman

Reisman isn’t just correcting a sloppy metaphor; he’s trying to strip a whole political worldview of its scientific costume. The phrase “survival of the fittest” has long been recruited to make capitalism sound like biology: inevitable, ruthless, and therefore morally unassailable. Reisman’s jab flips that move. If you describe markets as “the law of the jungle,” he suggests, you’re not revealing hard-headed realism - you’re advertising that you don’t understand what economics is actually modeling.

The intent is disciplinary and strategic. Disciplinary, because Reisman draws a boundary around the field: serious economics is about voluntary exchange, prices, incentives, coordination, and capital formation - not a cartoon of predators tearing into prey. Strategic, because the jungle metaphor is often deployed by critics to smuggle in a moral indictment (“capitalism is cruel by nature”) or by defenders to smuggle in a moral absolution (“cruelty is natural”). Reisman refuses both. He implies that competitive markets are not a melee but a system where “fitness” is measured by serving consumers better, lowering costs, innovating, and cooperating through contract. Competition, in that frame, is less tooth-and-claw than feedback-and-adaptation.

Subtext: he’s policing language because language polices conclusions. Call it a jungle and you’ve already decided the ending. Call it an economic order and you have to reckon with institutions, rights, entrepreneurship, and the nonzero-sum reality of trade. The line reads like a rebuke to Social Darwinist rhetoric and to anti-capitalist caricature alike: if you need animals to explain markets, you’re doing politics, not economics.