"A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
Milton Friedman (via themcdonaldcollation)
(via thefreelioness)
Only the free market can keep business honest
Instinctively, we look for people’s motives. We need to know whom we can trust and whom we can’t. We’re especially skeptical of business because we know business wants our money.
It took me too long to understand that business’s desire for profit is a good thing. To get our money, businesses — if they can’t look to the government for favors — need to give us what we want. Then they must make continuous improvements and do it better than the competition does.
That competition is enough to protect consumers. But that’s not intuitive. It’s intuitive to assume that competition isn’t really consumer protection and that experts at the FDA, FTC, DEA, FCC, CPSC, OSHA and so on must protect us. These experts consult “responsible” businessmen for advice on creating rules to make sure businesses meets minimum “standards.”
Unfortunately, this standardization stops innovation.
We are imprinted to be wary of newcomers, strangers. Newcomers by definition are less experienced. Maybe they’ll do something unsafe or dishonest! We don’t want government to stop them from doing business — we just want consumers protected! Governments claim to do that by licensing businesses.
People like the idea of licensing. We license drivers. We license dogs. It seems prudent. People naively think this government seal of approval makes us safer.
This naivete is used to justify all sorts of rules that kill competition.
Las Vegas regulators require anyone who wants to start a limousine business to prove his new business is needed and, worse, will not “adversely affect other carriers.” But every new business intends to beat its competitors. That’s the point. Competition is good for us. Las Vegas’ anticompetitive licensing rules mean limo customers pay more.
In Nashville, Tenn., regulators ruled it illegal for a limo to charge less than $45 a ride. One entrepreneur had won customers by charging half that, but the new regulations mean the established car service businesses no longer have to worry about him.
Perhaps Nashville’s and Vegas’ regulators really believe “this is an area where the free market doesn’t work,” as the manager of the Nevada Transportation Services Authority put it. But it’s fishy that charging big fees for licenses just happens to be a very effective shakedown operation. Vegas cab and limousine businesses give “substantial” donations to Vegas-area political candidates, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Our big government has justified its existence (at least since the Progressive Era) by claiming it is a “countervailing influence” to corporate power — when it is, in fact, incestuously entwined with corporations.
The list of business activities that government insists on licensing, supposedly for our sake, includes hair braiders in Mississippi, wooden-casket makers and florists in Louisiana and even yoga instructors in Virginia.
Established businesses always try to use government to handcuff competition. When margarine was first developed, the dairy industry got Wisconsin legislators to pass a law making margarine illegal. Several states ruled that margarine was “deceptive,” since it might be mistaken for butter. Some required a bright pink dye be added to make margarine look different. An “oleomargarine bootlegger” was thrown in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth.
When supermarkets were invented, small grocers tried to ban them. “A&P will dominate the grocery business and destroy Main Street,” the grocers claimed. Minnesota legislators responded by passing a law that forbade supermarkets to put food “on sale.”
Established capitalists are often capitalism’s biggest enemies.
I used to believe that licensing doctors and lawyers protected consumers, but now I realize that licensing is always an expensive restraint of trade. It certainly hasn’t barred quacks and shysters.
Licensing is unnecessary. It creates a false sense of security, raises costs, stifles innovation and takes away consumer choice.
I don’t deny that there is fraud in business. I won Emmys for exposing it. Fraud is one of three crimes that must be policed and punished for the market to function (theft and physical assault are the others). Once that’s done, however, as long as there is open competition, honesty pretty much takes care of itself.
Free competition — the striving for a good reputation — protects consumers better than government ever will
(Source: moralanarchism)
(Source: anarchei)
Making life fair
by John Stossel
When my wife was a liberal, she complained that libertarian reasoning is coldhearted. Since markets produce winners and losers — and many losers did nothing wrong — market competition is cruel. It must seem so. President Obama used the word “fair” in his last State of the Union address nine times.
We are imprinted to prefer a world that is “fair.” Our close relatives the chimpanzees freak out when one chimp gets more than his fair share, so zookeepers are careful about food portions. Chimps are hardwired to get angry when they think they’ve been cheated — and so are we.
Filmmaker Michael Moore took this notion about fairness to its intuitive conclusion during an interview with Laura Flanders of GRITtv, saying of rich people’s fortunes: “That’s not theirs! That’s a national resource! That’s ours!” As is typical, Moore was confused or disingenuous. In our corporatist economy, some fortunes are indeed made illegitimately though political means. The privileges that produce those fortunes should be abolished. But contrary to Moore, incomes are not “national resources.” If he’s concerned with illegitimate fortunes, he should favor freeing markets.
Fairness is related to justice, the recognition of people’s rights to their own lives.
A free market will create big differences in wealth. That wealth disparity is simply a byproduct of freedom — vastly diverse individuals competing to serve consumers will arrive at vastly diverse outcomes.
That disparity is not unfair — if it results from free exchange.
The free market (which, sadly, America doesn’t have) is fair. It also produces better outcomes. Even “losers” do pretty well.
A more astute observer than Moore might show how unfair government intervention is. Licenses, taxes, regulations and corporate subsidies make it harder for the average worker to start his own business, to go from being a “little guy” to being an independent owner of means of production. Most new businesses fail, but running your own business is the best route to prosperity and — surveys suggest — happiness, too.
I once opened a dinky business called “The Stossel Store” in Delaware, hawking hats, books and other goodies on the street. It was hard to open this store. I chose Delaware because it’s supposedly the state that makes that easiest — but “easiest” didn’t mean “easy.” I still required help from Fox’s lawyers to get the permits, and the process took more than a week. In my hometown, New York City, it would have taken much longer.
By contrast, in Hong Kong, I started a business in one day. Hong Kong’s limited government makes it easy for people to try things, and that has allowed poor people to prosper. Regular people benefit most from economic freedom.
What makes it hard for people to embrace markets is that anti-market zealots, with their talk of Americans pulling together to take care of one another, remind us of the coziness of village life. Instinct tells us that’s where we’ll find trust — and fairness.
But our intuition fools us when it leads us to think that government models that institutionalize what resembles village life must be good. Assuming that government can foster togetherness better than our own voluntary associations, businesses and private charities leads to coziness of the bad kind: back-room dealings between the well-connected and government.
If we’re going to have a large-scale, modern society, we need relatively simple rules that respect individual rights and that can be applied to all sorts of new situations without having to put global commerce on hold until the hypothetical village elders come up with a plan.
Since most human beings still lived as farmers two centuries ago, the idea of stranger-filled cosmopolitan life outside the small, close-knit village is still novel. It was only around the 18th and 19th centuries that the ideas we now think of as classical liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism and laissez faire began to be articulated. As Westerners became accustomed to living without the rule of kings, aristocrats and village elders, they began, for the first time since the dawn of writing, to imagine living ungoverned lives.
Sure, it’s scary, but surrendering your fate to politicians and bureaucrats is a lot scarier.
(Source: moralanarchism)
The Assault on Food
I don’t want the government regulating anything even our food. What the government tells us usually isn’t for our own good. They tell us what to do in their best interest, our diet is no different.
The free market can regulate food and food safety much better, more efficiently, and with more accountability than any government agency.
by John Stossel
Instinct tells us to fear poison. If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us.
Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical — or food ingredient, like fat — is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it easy for government to leap in and play the role of protector.
But for every study that says X is bad for you, another study disagrees. How is a layman to decide? I used to take consumer activists’ word for it. Heck, they want to save the world, while industry just wants to get rich. Now I know better. The activists want money, too — and fame.
To arbitrate, it’s intuitive to turn to government — except … government scientists have conflicts, too.
Who becomes a regulator except people who want to regulate? Some come from activist groups that hate industry. Some come from industry and want to convert their government job into a higher-paying industry job. Some just want attention. They know that saying, “X will kill you,” gets more attention than saying that X is probably safe.
I don’t suggest that we ignore the experts and eat like pigs. But the scientific question should not overshadow the more fundamental issue. Who should decide what you can eat: you? Or the state? Should government decide what we may eat, any more than it decides where we live or how long our hair will be? The Food Police claim that they just want to help us make informed choices. But that’s not all they want to do. They try to get government to force us to make healthy choices.
The moral issue of force versus persuasion applies even if all the progressives’ ideas about nutrition are correct. Even if I would be better off eating no fat and salt, that would not justify forcing restaurants to stop serving me those things. Either we live in a free society or we don’t.
It is no coincidence that the push for more food regulation came at a time when Congress obsessed about the rising cost of medical care. When government pays for your health care, it will inevitably be drawn into regulating your personal life. First, politicians promise to pay. Then, they propose to control you.
Where does it stop? If we must control diet to balance the government’s budget, will the health squad next ban skydiving and extramarital sex? How about another try at Prohibition?
Government attracts do-gooders and meddlers who believe that, as Mark Twain put it, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Or, as Twain’s spiritual descendant, H.L. Mencken, said about Puritanism, government health officials seem to have “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Often the Food Police strike an innocent pose, claiming that they just want to give people information. Information is good. But it’s not free. Mandated calorie signs in restaurants cost money. Those costs are passed on to consumers, and the endless parade of calorie counts and warning labels make us numb to more important warnings — like, “This Coffee Is Scalding Hot.”
It’s not as if dietary information isn’t already available. Health and diet websites abound. Talk shows routinely discuss the latest books on diet and nutrition. TV diet gurus are celebrities. That’s enough. We have information. We don’t need government force.
Let the marketplace of diet ideas flourish. Let claim meet counterclaim, but let’s not let government put its very heavy thumb on one side of the scale.
The assumption behind so much of government’s policy regarding food (and everything else) is that everything good should be encouraged by law and everything bad should be discouraged.
But since everything is arguably helpful or harmful, this is a formula for totalitarianism.
Thomas Hobbes assumed an all-powerful government was necessary to protect us from violence. He called it Leviathan. But he never imagined Leviathan would plan our dinners.
(Source: moralanarchism)
The Libertarian Manifesto on Pollution
Only the free market can protect the environment. Government rules and regulations don’t protect anything other than favored political connected corporations by making it too hard and expensive for competitors to enter the market place.
All right: Even if we concede that full private property in resources and the free market will conserve and create resources, and do it far better than government regulation, what of the problem of pollution? Wouldn’t we be suffering aggravated pollution from unchecked “capitalist greed”?
There is, first of all, this stark empirical fact: Government ownership, even socialism, has proved to be no solution to the problem of pollution. Even the most starry-eyed proponents of government planning concede that the poisoning of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to heedless industrial pollution of a valuable natural resource. But there is far more to the problem than that. Note, for example, the two crucial areas in which pollution has become an important problem: the air and the waterways, particularly the rivers. But these are precisely two of the vital areas in society in which private property has not been permitted to function.
First, the rivers. The rivers, and the oceans too, are generally owned by the government; private property, certainly complete private property, has not been permitted in the water. In essence, then, government owns the rivers. But government ownership is not true ownership, because the government officials, while able to control the resource cannot themselves reap their capital value on the market. Government officials cannot sell the rivers or sell stock in them. Hence, they have no economic incentive to preserve the purity and value of the rivers. Rivers are, then, in the economic sense, “unowned”; therefore government officials have permitted their corruption and pollution. Anyone has been able to dump polluting garbage and wastes in the waters. But consider what would happen if private firms were able to own the rivers and the lakes. If a private firm owned Lake Erie, for example, then anyone dumping garbage in the lake would be promptly sued in the courts for their aggression against private property and would be forced by the courts to pay damages and to cease and desist from any further aggression. Thus, only private property rights will insure an end to pollution — invasion of resources. Only because the rivers are unowned is there no owner to rise up and defend his precious resource from attack. If, in contrast, anyone should dump garbage or pollutants into a lake which is privately owned (as are many smaller lakes), he would not be permitted to do so for very long — the owner would come roaring to its defense.[1] Professor Dolan writes:
With a General Motors owning the Mississippi River, you can be sure that stiff effluent charges would be assessed on industries and municipalities along its banks, and that the water would be kept clean enough to maximize revenues from leases granted to firms seeking rights to drinking water, recreation, and commercial fishing.[2]
If government as owner has allowed the pollution of the rivers, government has also been the single major active polluter, especially in its role as municipal sewage disposer. There already exist low-cost chemical toilets which can burn off sewage without polluting air, ground, or water; but who will invest in chemical toilets when local governments will dispose of sewage free to their customers?
This example points up a problem similar to the case of the stunting of aquaculture technology by the absence of private property: if governments as owners of the rivers permit pollution of water, then industrial technology will — and has — become a water-polluting technology. If production processes are allowed to pollute the rivers unchecked by their owners, then that is the sort of production technology we will have.
If the problem of water pollution can be cured by private property rights in water, how about air pollution? How can libertarians possibly come up with a solution for this grievous problem? Surely, there can’t be private property in the air? But the answer is: yes, there can. We have already seen how radio and TV frequencies can be privately owned. So could channels for airlines. Commercial airline routes, for example, could be privately owned; there is no need for a Civil Aeronautics Board to parcel out — and restrict — routes between various cities. But in the case of air pollution we are dealing not so much with private property in the air as with protecting private property in one’s lungs, fields, and orchards. The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants — from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides — through the air and into the lungs of innocent victims, as well as onto their material property. All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the private property of the victims. Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggression as committing arson against another’s property or injuring him physically. Air pollution that injures others is aggression pure and simple. The major function of government — of courts and police — is to stop aggression; instead, the government has failed in this task and has failed grievously to exercise its defense function against air pollution.
It is important to realize that this failure has not been a question purely of ignorance, a simple time lag between recognizing a new technological problem and facing up to it. For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known, factory smoke and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution, known to the extent that the American courts, during the late — and as far back as the early 19th century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to — and did — systematically change and weaken the defenses of property right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law. Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the 19th century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.
As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, the farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions against further invasion of their property. But the judges said, in effect, “Sorry. We know that industrial smoke (i.e., air pollution) invades and interferes with your property rights. But there is something more important than mere property rights: and that is public policy, the ‘common good.’ And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing, industrial progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be overridden on behalf of the general welfare.” And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property, in the form of lung disease and countless other ailments. And all for the “common good”![3]
That this principle has guided the courts during the air age as well may be seen by a decision of the Ohio courts in Antonik v. Chamberlain (1947). The residents of a suburban area near Akron sued to enjoin the defendants from operating a privately owned airport. The grounds were invasion of property rights through excessive noise. Refusing the injunction, the court declared:
In our business of judging in this case, while sitting as a court of equity, we must not only weigh the conflict of interests between the airport owner and the nearby landowners, but we must further recognize the public policy of the generation in which we live. We must recognize that the establishment of an airport … is of great concern to the public, and if such an airport is abated, or its establishment prevented, the consequences will be not only a serious injury to the owner of the port property but may be a serious loss of a valuable asset to the entire community.[4]
To cap the crimes of the judges, legislatures, federal and state, moved in to cement the aggression by prohibiting victims of air pollution from engaging in “class action” suits against polluters. Obviously, if a factory pollutes the atmosphere of a city where there are tens of thousands of victims, it is impractical for each victim to sue to collect his particular damages from the polluter (although an injunction could be used effectively by one small victim). The common law, therefore, recognizes the validity of “class action” suits, in which one or a few victims can sue the aggressor not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of the entire class of similar victims. But the legislatures systematically outlawed such class action suits in pollution cases. For this reason, a victim may successfully sue a polluter who injures him individually, in a one-to-one “private nuisance” suit. But he is prohibited by law from acting against a mass polluter who is injuring a large number of people in a given area! As Frank Bubb writes, “It is as if the government were to tell you that it will (attempt to) protect you from a thief who steals only from you, but it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood.”[5]
Noise, too, is a form of air pollution. Noise is the creation of sound waves which go through the air and then bombard and invade the property and persons of others. Only recently have physicians begun to investigate the damaging effects of noise on the human physiology. Again, a libertarian legal system would permit damage and class action suits and injunctions against excessive and damaging noise: against “noise pollution.”
The remedy against air pollution is therefore crystal clear, and it has nothing to do with multibillion-dollar palliative government programs at the expense of the taxpayers which do not even meet the real issue. The remedy is simply for the courts to return to their function of defending person and property rights against invasion, and therefore to enjoin anyone from injecting pollutants into the air. But what of the propollution defenders of industrial progress? And what of the increased costs that would have to be borne by the consumer? And what of our present polluting technology?
The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton, and that therefore abolition, however morally correct, was “impractical.” For this means that the polluters are able to impose all of the high costs of pollution upon those whose lungs and property rights they have been allowed to invade with impunity.
(Source: moralanarchism)
"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
Milton Friedman (via learnliberty)
Should the rich be condemmed?
By Walter Williams.
Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the DC motor and other items in everyday use and became wealthy by doing so. Thomas Watson founded IBM and became rich through his company’s contribution to the computation revolution. Lloyd Conover, while in the employ of Pfizer, created the antibiotic tetracycline. Though Edison, Watson, Conover and Pfizer became wealthy, whatever wealth they received pales in comparison with the extraordinary benefits received by ordinary people. Billions of people benefited from safe and efficient lighting. Billions more were the ultimate beneficiaries of the computer, and untold billions benefited from healthier lives gained from access to tetracycline.
President Barack Obama, in stoking up class warfare, said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” This is lunacy. Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire produced the raw materials that built the physical infrastructure of the United States. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and produced software products that aided the computer revolution. But Carnegie had amassed quite a fortune long before he built Carnegie Steel Co., and Gates had quite a fortune by 1990. Had they the mind of our president, we would have lost much of their contributions, because they had already “made enough money.”
Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there’s a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they “give back.” Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.
In a free society, for the most part, people with high incomes have demonstrated extraordinary ability to produce valuable services for — and therefore please — their fellow man. People voluntarily took money out of their pockets to purchase the products of Gates, Pfizer or IBM. High incomes reflect the democracy of the marketplace. The reason Gates is very wealthy is millions upon millions of people voluntarily reached into their pockets and handed over $300 or $400 for a Microsoft product. Those who think he has too much money are really registering disagreement with decisions made by millions of their fellow men.
In a free society, in a significant way income inequality reflects differences in productive capacity, namely one’s ability to please his fellow man. For example, I can play basketball and so can LeBron James, but would the Miami Heat pay me anything close to the $43 million they pay him? If not, why not? I think it has to do with the discriminating tastes of basketball fans who pay $100 or more to watch the game. If the Miami Heat hired me, they would have to pay fans to watch.
Stubborn ignorance sees capitalism as benefiting only the rich, but the evidence refutes that. The rich have always been able to afford entertainment; it was the development and marketing of radio and television that made entertainment accessible to the common man. The rich have never had the drudgery of washing and ironing clothing, beating out carpets or waxing floors. The mass production of washing machines, wash-and-wear clothing, vacuum cleaners and no-wax floors spared the common man this drudgery. At one time, only the rich could afford automobiles, telephones and computers. Now all but a small percentage of Americans enjoy these goods.
The prospects are dim for a society that makes mascots out of the unproductive and condemns the productive.
(Source: moralanarchism)
"A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
Milton Friedman (via rhyeking)
(Source: kawaii-world-order)
"In a free market, you can bottle your own piss and sell...
“In a free market, you can bottle your own piss and sell it as a magical cure!”
I actually heard this on Youtube.And it’s absolutely correct. If a free market, you could do that.
But nobody would have to buy it.
If people were used to looking for a private seal of approval on the medicine they buy, nobody would want something without a seal. Nowadays, if I sold bottled piss in a drug store, people would probably buy it, since after all “The government wouldn’t let them sell it if it weren’t safe!”
I think it’s important to note that a free market doesn’t mean deregulation necessarily. All it means is that it’s not necessarily the government doing the regulating.
(via rigatonideology)
How will ______ work in a free market?
If I ever bring up the idea of eliminating public goods and services, especially if I talk about examples of privatizing schools and roads, I’m always asked to explain how a privatized system would work in a free market.
To be honest, I don’t know. I can merely hypothesize based on articles and books I’ve read and my imagination. Of course, this isn’t good enough for most people. I can’t say, “I don’t know”. They want a utilitarian explanation before they can even begin to take my argument seriously.
However, I watched a Stefan Molyneux video (start at 8:05) the other day and he explained perfectly why a complete utilitarian explanation shouldn’t be the deciding factor with issues such as public goods.
Jump back in early American history when slavery was still legal in Southern states. As people began to voice their opinion against slavery and argued that slaves should be freed to protect their natural rights, similar utilitarian claims were made by slave owners.
“But if we free the slaves, who will pick all of the cotton?”
The answer is simple: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how the cotton is going to be picked because slavery is immoral and it violates the natural rights of those people.
The answer should be the same for the privatization of roads, schools, and any other public good regardless of whether or not a holistic utilitarian answer is presented. It doesn’t matter how roads and schools will be provided in a free market. It doesn’t matter because the current system which is funded through legitimized theft, more commonly known as taxation, is immoral and should be ended.
Baseball Libertarian: Who protects the consumers?
The free market and competition protects the consumer not the government.
It is just as true now as it was when Henry Hazlitt wrote this in the 60s.
Consumers are sometimes asked to pay too much for goods. This has been true since the beginning of time. Their great protection against overcharging has been competition. The intelligent shopper can compare price and quality, and go to the merchant who offers the best goods at the cheapest price.
Consumers are sometimes cheated. This also has been true since the beginning of time. They have sometimes been the victims of deceptive practices; they have been sold shoddy goods, or defective goods, or goods that have been misrepresented. Again, their greatest protection has always been competition. They can cease to buy from the dishonest merchant. In addition, when the amount involved is large enough, they have been able under general laws against dishonest practices to resort to the law or to take a case to court.
But in recent years, particularly in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, an ominous network of legislation has grown up that attempts to regulate quality and quantity in the minutest detail in one industry or trade after another.
(Source: moralanarchism)
Governments don't and can't create prosperity
Politicians say they create jobs, but they really don’t. Or rather, they rarely create productive jobs. Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and give them to another. The pharaohs might have claimed they created work when they ordered that pyramids be built, but think how much richer (and freer) the Egyptians would have been if they’d been allowed to pursue their own interests.
It’s individuals in the marketplace who create real jobs — when they have the protection of life and property under the rule of law.
Economic freedom is the key. The theory couldn’t be more clear, and at this late date in human history, it shouldn’t be necessary to rehearse the abundant evidence. Look at the various indexes that correlate economic freedom with economic growth. The healthiest economies are those with the most economic freedom. Unemployment is low in those places — 3 percent in Hong Kong, 2 percent in Singapore, 5 percent in Australia
Alas, the United States places ninth, behind Canada, and those countries with the least economic freedom have few real jobs and no prosperity.
Unfortunately, most politicians still don’t understand — or have no incentive to understand — that economic freedom, and therefore less government, creates prosperity. Well, maybe that’s changing. This year is first I’ve heard so many presidential candidates talk about the private sector. Indeed, one candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, told me he created “not one single job. … Government does not create jobs.”
(Source: moralanarchism)
