By Thomas Sowell
Every year about this time, big-government liberals stand up in front of college commencement crowds across the country and urge the graduates to do the noblest thing possible-- become big-government liberals.
That isn't how they phrase it, of course. Commencement speakers express great reverence for "public service," as distinguished from narrow private "greed." There is usually not the slightest sign of embarrassment at this self-serving celebration of the kinds of careers they have chosen-- over and above the careers of others who merely provide us with the food we eat, the homes we live in, the clothes we wear and the medical care that saves our health and our lives.
What I would like to see is someone with the guts to tell those students: Do you want to be of some use and service to your fellow human beings? Then let your fellow human beings tell you what they want-- not with words, but by putting their money where their mouth is.
You want to see more people have better housing? Build it! Become a builder or developer-- if you can stand the sneers and disdain of your classmates and professors who regard the very words as repulsive.
Would you like to see more things become more affordable to more people? Then figure out more efficient ways of producing things or more efficient ways of getting those things from the producers to the consumers at a lower cost.
That's what a man named Sam Walton did when he created Wal-Mart, a boon to people with modest incomes and a bane to the elite intelligentsia. In the process, Sam Walton became rich. Was that the "greed" that you have heard your classmates and professors denounce so smugly? If so, it has been such "greed" that has repeatedly brought prices down and thereby brought the American standard of living up.
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, only 15 percent of American families had a flush toilet. Not quite one-fourth had running water. Only three percent had electricity and one percent had central heating. Only one American family in a hundred owned an automobile.
By 1970, the vast majority of those American families who were living in poverty had flush toilets, running water and electricity. By the end of the twentieth century, more Americans were connected to the Internet than were connected to a water pipe or a sewage line at the beginning of the century.
Read the rest here.
Seeing wealthy people in a free market pisses off the socialists because they believe in objective-value based Marxist exploitation theory. And they're at it again, this time in China.
ReplyDeleteAnother argument that socialists make is that markets, specifically financial markets, are irrational and misprice things. Columbia's Jeffery Sachs made that claim repeatedly in that Hugh Hendry video going around the internet ("I recommend you panic"). If Sachs is so damn sure the markets are mispricing things, why doesn't he form a hedge fund of his own to put in a bid on, say, all that Greek debt that has a "reasonable" chance of being serviced by the Hellenic Republic?
It's funny, these people always know better than the markets yet never see fit to risk their own capital on their prognostications but instead OPMs through tax/inflation-financed bailouts. And let's all ignore the horrendous injustice of taxing/inflating a person's wealth away and then using their own wealth to bid against them in the market.