Memo to Vox: You Know How This Prosperity Was Achieved? We Let it Happen.
Vox shares what is perhaps the greatest achievement in human history, the continuing disappearance of absolute poverty:
Readers of this blog will likely have seen this before (though it may well be new to Vox readers). Here is the amazing thing about the Vox article: It never once mentions capitalism, trade, economic freedom, or any synonym. Here is a sampling of the tone of the accompanying article:
There's still much work to be done: 14.4 percent of the world amounts to 1 billion people who still need to be lifted out of extreme poverty. And making sure everyone's making at least $1.25 a day isn't the end of the fight either. The world's median income is still only $3 to $4 a day. By comparison, the poverty line in the US for a family of four is $16.61 per person per day. Once under-$1.25-a-day poverty is eradicated, the world needs to set about eradicating under-$15-a-day poverty, which will be a substantially harder task.
Vox is treating this like it is the result of some top-down effort, using the same language one might use to describe the eradication of Yellow Fever in Panama. As if this resulted (and as if future progress depended on) some all-hands-on-deck technocratic government program.
No one "set about" eradicating poverty. It happened because governments, at least to some extent, got out of the way and didn't stop it. China is a great example. Mao "set about" trying to eliminate poverty using many of the approaches likely favored by the Vox staff, and killed a few tens of millions of people in the process.
Here is my theory of the world's accelerating wealth formation that I have written on a number of times before. This chart largely results from:
- There was a philosophical and intellectual change where questioning established beliefs and social patterns wentfrom being heresy and unthinkable to being acceptable, and even in vogue. In other words, men, at first just the elite but soon everyone, were urged to use their mind rather than just relying on established beliefs and appeals to authority.
- There were social and political changes that greatly increased the number of people capable of entrepreneurship. Before this time, the vast vast majority of people were locked into social positions that allowed them no flexibility to act on a good idea, even if they had one. By starting to create a large and free middle class, first in the Netherlands and England and then in the US, more people had the ability to use their mind to create new wealth. Whereas before, perhaps 1% or
less of any population really had the freedom to truly act on their ideas, after 1700 many more people began to have this freedom.
So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using their minds more freely.
stan:
Matt Ridley has it nailed. See the Rational Optimist. Ted talk here (more valuable than a semester of college in a serious major) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHh9E5ilZ4
The key is the sharing of information. The development of the printing press is not generally given enough credit.
August 14, 2015, 10:11 amMatthew Slyfield:
"It happened because governments, at least to some extent, got out of the way and didn't stop it."
Absolutely.
August 14, 2015, 10:20 amNone:
You have to wonder about the accuracy when there is no indication of world war 1 or 2.
August 14, 2015, 10:48 ammorganovich:
i am not sure they would really show up much.
keep in mind, we are talking about truly dire absolute poverty here. the metric is $1.25 per day. few such folks were much affected by WW2 and few others were made so poor.
this is the direst of poverty they are talking about here. it barely exists at all in the US or oecd. most americans that think they have seen "poverty" have not even seen anything close to real poverty. panhandling american homeless do not even make this list.
August 14, 2015, 11:26 amslocum:
Yep. Along the same lines, this has been around a while, but it's really great:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen?language=en
August 14, 2015, 12:13 pmSamWah:
Vox knows (KNOWS) that all good things come from the smartest, most educated people (like HIMSELF).
August 14, 2015, 1:51 pmGeorg Thomas:
Politics and Government played a huge role in this welcome development, and continues to be vital for civil society, i.e. the world in which personal freedom takes place.
"It happened because governments, at least to some extent, got out of the way and didn't stop it." This is a blatant misrepresentation.
The author should know better, after all he correctly writes: "There were social and political changes that greatly increased the number of people capable of entrepreneurship."
To equate Maoism that "killed a few tens of millions of people in the process" with "the approaches likely favored by the Vox staff" disqualifies the proponent.
This is cheap propaganda which I regret all the more as Warren is one of my top favourite bloggers, one of the brightest and most instructive libertarians to read.
It is this kind of blatantly false black-and-white stuff that makes me drift farther and farther away from my libertarian home port.
August 14, 2015, 2:30 pmCB CB:
Ye gods! Is there a tip o' the hat to any Government-sponsored education system that gave rise to the "number of people capable of entrepreneurship"? ___________ {insert public school joke here}
Seriously-- think what you will about public schools. But look at the graph! Technology enablement (manifest thru the Space Race and the Cold War) threw our planet into an education-frenzy: this mass-knowledge sharing seems to have helped stem poverty with near-exponential results (again, according to the graph) and thank God for it.
+1: Georg's salient reply
August 14, 2015, 2:53 pm+1: Stan for mentioning printing press. The baseline for mass-scale education.
vikingvista:
"The author should know better, after all he correctly writes: "There were social and political changes that greatly increased the number of people capable of entrepreneurship.""
Those political changes were negative ones. The only deliberate changes that any government decision-makers did to significantly contribute to this unprecedented drop in worldwide poverty, was to choose to not prevent it as much they had. Economic liberalization (i.e. governments getting out of the way of economic activity) was most dramatic in China, which is why Mao gets special mention.
August 14, 2015, 10:01 pmmesaeconoguy:
So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using their minds more freely.
Absolutely spot-on. The Vox staff would refer to and do support things like the Bismarckian social democracy/welfare state, and point to the rise of those things in aiding this trend.
This chart has virtually nothing to do with that. In fact, given the impending failure of Bismarckian social democracy, it would be far more accurate to say this happened in spite of expanded government roles and “safety nets.”
August 15, 2015, 10:12 amAnn_In_Illinois:
Government providing schools for everyone is a good idea and a good policy, but the causal effect here is pretty small. Educating their children is something that parents want to do - as incomes grew, more and more families would have had enough money to get their children a good education even without government interference (and the Catholic Church, among others, would have helped educate many poor children). The main benefit of government involvement is to make sure that such an education is available to 100% of families, rather than say 90%, and I'll say again that this is good. But it does not explain the huge shift we see. You're confusing cause and effect.
Once again, China is a good example. The money the government put into its brutal one-child policy would have been better spent guaranteeing a high school education for girls in rural areas - it would have helped to push back the average age that they started having children, slowing the population growth, and would have had positive side-effects (rather than the negative side-effects of the one-child policy).
August 15, 2015, 10:20 amAnn_In_Illinois:
It was Mao's industrial policy (the Great Leap) that killed tens of millions through widespread famine when the food was easily available. Granted, the Cultural Revolution then led to many more deaths, but a big part of the need for the Cultural Revolution was to get rid of Mao's opponents who remembered the catastrophe of the Great Leap famine. Among the first to go in the Cultural Revolution were the few local leaders that opened government granaries to stop starvation during the Great Leap; and Mao turned the young people against their parents in part because the parents remembered the famine and thus had to be discredited. Mao focused on those with the dimmest memories of the effects of his industrial and farming policies.
It all began with central planning of the economy - Mao wanted to industrialize quickly with a top-down approach. It's a good illustration of one of the big dangers of top-down: lack of diversification. China had had many famines in the past, but no famine would ever have covered such a huge area through natural means (despite their spreading stories of bad weather that covered the entire country but mysteriously stopped at the border and didn't show up on radar). It took Mao deliberately imposing his 'scientific' ideas on everyone at once, compounded by the desire of himself and those under him to pretend that they were actually quite good ideas.
Local leaders knew that they were expected to report much higher crop yields than normal, so they did report that even though the yields were lower due to Lysenko-style stupidity (the same bad ideas that top Chinese Communist Party leaders had witnessed first-hand leading to the Ukraine famine). Farmers were expected to turn over the usual percentage, but of the reported high yields rather than the actual abnormally low yields. When they resisted, the farmers were accused of hiding the excess (since everyone "knew" that Mao's farming ideas were productive), so they would go to farms and take every every last grain that they could find, leaving entire villages with no food. The government granaries were full, China was exporting grain, and the people died, all thanks to central planning.
August 15, 2015, 10:53 amGeorg Thomas:
Being critical of government and its deficits is of the essence. That should be a matter-of-course to those conscious of freedom, but we also should be capable of viewing the full picture of the role of government in free societies.
We do not have a choice between a world with and one without government. Fighting for freedom requires fighting for it within a political order and its institutions, which in our countries have been built to support freedom in vital ways.
The majority of people the world over suffer far more than would be the case if only they had government as it exists in our countries. Unlike us, they do not have enough government of the right kind.
Hernando de Soto argues this case impressively in his "The Mystery of Capital," where he presents an important chapter in American political history - the emergence of the Homesteading Act - for more read here:
http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2015/04/the-homestead-act-politics-legislation-and-government-for-liberty.html
August 15, 2015, 10:58 amAnn_In_Illinois:
You're right that China is a great example of how it's done. The first big jump in productivity under Deng (the 'green revolution') was from the government stepping back from its micromanagement of farmers, allowing the communes to be turned back into private (well, at least semi-private) farms where farmers made their own decisions. Food output skyrocketed. As the government gradually stepped back even more under Deng, the economy grew and modernized. They're still way behind Taiwan on a per capita basis, but many were lifted out of poverty thanks to Deng having the courage to move, however slowly, towards more of a market system.
Another good comparison (besides China and Taiwan) is North and South Korea - same culture, traditions, climate, etc., but one had top-down management and the other allowed markets to work. South Korea and Taiwan began as military dictatorships, but the economy was largely left alone, allowing the growth of a middle class that then eventually demanded political as well as economic freedoms.
I think that your list of what led to world economic progress should start with the rule of law and individual rights. People had the right to pursue their own ideas, knowing that they would be allowed to keep much of what they built.
August 15, 2015, 11:05 amCB CB:
Hi Ann,
Fair points you raise-- and thank you. But the cause and effect confusion you point to is not readily apparent (at least to me ;) Education is a medium or a tool to eradicate poverty-- perhaps it's the most effective and profound way aside from free-market incentives to get out of poverty (seek jobs, middle class life, etc.)
The government-funded space race and cold war were two examples in my post that did not get a mention in your reply-- so from the perspective of cause and effect-- the Government's spending on these "efforts" seem to be huge determinants in the equation for reducing poverty worldwide. Cause and effect aside-- the Government did not "get out of the way" in either the Space Race or Cold War-- it was the sole, deterministic driver-- and the education boom and subsequent exponential decline in poverty were main EFFECTS of this education and spending boom. I maintain that government-funded education has done more to eradicate poverty than any other "invention" of the last Century.
Be well,
August 15, 2015, 11:48 amChris
Georg Thomas:
In the Vox text, except for reference to growth as such, I find no statement that explains the cause of the elimination of poverty, nor reference to technocratic-interventionist, nor any other policy prescriptions.
Nor is there the least support for the assertion according to which
'Mao "set about" trying to eliminate poverty using many of the approaches
likely favored by the Vox staff, and killed a few tens of millions of
people in the process.'
Mao's policies were followed by other policies and these by yet other policies, forming an uninterrupted chain to this day. Economic development whether in China or anywhere else is always intertwined with politics, government and the state.
This is true for a free society, too, since the possibility of mass political participation is one of the foremost demands of liberty. Not only are there countless issues that need to be settled while markets cannot be used to settle them, which produces a strong demand for politics, especially in a free society people demand on a mass scale involvement in these issues, which demand is our best protection against despotism like that of the Maoist type.
August 16, 2015, 5:28 amLowcountryJoe:
You are aware that Vox was founded by the same people who started The Daily Kos; right?
August 16, 2015, 7:25 amMatthew Slyfield:
CB CB,
"I maintain that government-funded education has done more to eradicate poverty than any other "invention" of the last Century."
The problem with this theory to explain the graph above, is that the graph above is looking at absolute poverty, people living on $1.25 US or less per day. No one, not even charity cases in Europe or North America has qualified to be counted going all the way back to the start of the graph. Most of the countries where those people live don't have government funded education, even today.
August 16, 2015, 10:13 amScott Robinson:
I wonder if Vox can square the desire to raise the poverty level to median US income with the desire by environmentalists to cap CO2 production thereby making energy and its use prohibitively expensive for the impoverished.
August 16, 2015, 2:07 pmAnn_In_Illinois:
Hi Chris,
We'll never be able to prove which factor had the biggest effect, but I would argue that the development and growth of the venture capital industry in the 1970s and 1980s, combined with deregulation in the 1980s, had more impact on growth around the world. Government funding of basic research (including Space Race funding) can be helpful, but only if there's a vibrant private sector that can turn invention to innovation (Schumpeter's distinction), by figuring out how to apply it. How many world-changing innovations, big or small, came from the Soviet Union? The diversity of a million experiments was unleashed in the 1980s by deregulation, moving away from the excessive socialism around the world that had held back telecommunications, transportation, etc. (In the US, deregulation was done in the airline, railroad, bus, telecommunications, broadcasting, banking, cable television, oil and gas and trucking (motor carrier) industries.)
One big advantage that the US had in technological development was that the computer hardware, computer software, internet and venture capital industries were all new enough that vested interests hadn't yet induced massive government meddling. Government contributed to the internet (ARPANET and TCP/IP), as opposed to managing it, which meant that innovation was allowed and the world benefited.
But this post is about people around the world being lifted out of poverty, and that was accomplished not by more large government programs but by governments allowing markets, trade and individual rights.
August 16, 2015, 2:09 pmobloodyhell:
And in as little as one or two generations, we're pretty well along to reversing that.
And in as little as one or two generations, we're pretty well along to reversing that.
THANK YOU PostModern Liberalism, for your hard work towards throwing all of humanity back into the Dark Ages... Your attacks on Western Civilization's core ideas -- from the inheritance of Classical Greek Thought to the morals and manners underlying Judeo-Christianity -- you are well along the way to throwing it all away.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances
August 16, 2015, 4:56 pmwhich permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are
the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often
condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.
Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or, as sometimes
happens, is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject
poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'."
- Lazarus Long(R. A. Heinlein) -
obloodyhell:
Certainly they can. The goal is to screw everything up, not to actually HELP anyone. (snort!) The Idea!! Yeesh...
August 16, 2015, 4:58 pmobloodyhell:
Actually, if you read P.J. O'Rourke's Eat The Rich, he makes the very point, after travelling around and looking at the world's success cases and basket cases that, more important than Democracy, more important than Civil Rights -- the thing that makes a society work first and foremost, to be at least moderately "successful", is The Rule of Law.
August 16, 2015, 5:02 pmobloodyhell:
}}} "There were social and political changes that greatly increased the number of people capable of entrepreneurship."
And what, in your opinion, WERE these, if not "governments getting out of the way"?
It certainly can't be the educational system, that's been steadily and undeniably deteriorating ever since it got mostly into the hands of governments.
It can't be the endless rise of bureaucratic fiat regulation that has slowly strangled the small businessman.
Your entire diatribe is balderdash. It contains nothing but naysaying. Put up or shut up. You ain't no libertarian at all.
August 16, 2015, 5:06 pmobloodyhell:
}}} Mao turned the young people against their parents in part because the parents remembered the famine and thus had to be discredited. Mao focused on those with the dimmest memories of the effects of his industrial and farming policies.
Pretty much the same thing as the liberals are doing to the youth of today.
August 16, 2015, 5:11 pmobloodyhell:
}}} Not only are there countless issues that need to be settled while markets cannot be used to settle them, which produces a strong demand for politics,
Yeah, like Solyndra. You're right, governments are needed to fix problems that "markets can't" -- like pushing for idiotic ideas like Green Tech that the market rightly ignores. And of course, you had the result of what the market couldn't -- a billion dollars in tax credits handed to the last-minute "saviors" of a broken investment that ranked AHEAD of the rights of US citizens in their loss of misspent tax dollars.
The net result of such "policy" is something every ACTUAL libertarian grasps without being told -- those with power rig financial transfers from the US citizenry into their own pockets, something that they could not achieve with market forces.
Keep going, Georg, you're managing to dig yourself a nice deep hole.
I repeat, you're not a libertarian at all, you're a closet liberal.
}}} Mao's policies were followed by other policies and these by yet other policies, forming an uninterrupted chain to this day.
Yes, an uninterrupted chain that basically involved increasing and more disastrous failures, until finally some Chinese Bright Boy -- with the ear of Deng, clearly -- pushed the idea of "mostly hands off". And it was only with this increasing "hands off" policy has China succeeded in leaving behind the grinding poverty of a billion people.
August 16, 2015, 5:20 pmobloodyhell:
}}} but we also should be capable of viewing the full picture of the role of government in free societies.
We are. It appears you aren't.
August 16, 2015, 5:21 pmobloodyhell:
}}} Seriously-- think what you will about public schools.
Expressing what I think about public schools in the invective form I would use would not be appreciated in this forum. They are quite possibly, singularly the WORST thing that has happened to this nation in the last 150 years. There is nothing positive which they have done which could not have been done FAR more effectively by private schools. If one fears that parents cannot afford such, then sure, public funding, in the form of Vouchers, might be argued for. But the only hope for this nation lies in destroying the current existing school mechanism. And, since there's too many like you who can't grasp how utterly, abysmally WRETCHED they are at pretty much everything but turning out LIVs and fools, that is improbable... and so this nation is doomed.
I can only hope that something positive comes out of the wreckage, but I don't think that the forces which created the successful qualities of this nation are available anywhere in this world, and they are being systematically destroyed -- in large part by public schools -- here.
August 16, 2015, 5:27 pmMJ:
I wonder how they explain the sharp drop in poverty during the last 25 years of the 20th century, at a time when governments in North America and Western Europe were retrenching and moving to the right, and when socialist states in China and the former USSR were starting to liberalize.
August 16, 2015, 9:02 pmkevinstroup:
And it can be attributed to free market capitalism. Even socialism relies in the free market to generate the revenue that is taxed. Those taxes then provide for the socialism. Funny how free market capitalism was never mentioned in the article. Did this prosperity just miraculously happen?
August 17, 2015, 5:56 amMichaelKennedy:
It may even be more simple than Rule of Law. Private Property depends on Rule of Law but, once private property allows people to keep their wealth, there is no limit. Ever wonder why fracking is only important in the US ? Mineral rights are private in this country.
August 17, 2015, 6:02 amEndOfPatience:
Still, until you have Rule of Law, the right to private property is iffy.
August 17, 2015, 6:07 amkcom:
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Georg.
August 17, 2015, 7:06 amkcom:
Education might be necessary but it's not sufficient. I I believe Cuba probably claims a 100% literacy rate. So what? They're still mired in poverty because the government won't get out of the way and let human nature and human ingenuity take it's course. They think they can mold everyone to be how they want them to be based on their ossified ideology. But human nature doesn't work that way. Hence, poverty.
August 17, 2015, 7:20 amMastro63:
We are reading this the wrong way- look how EQUAL people were back in 1820!
August 17, 2015, 7:23 amgurugeorge:
The thing is, though, it's easy for a pro-gov person to look at the thing and say to the anti-gov type, "well look, here you are complaining about all the increasing gov activity going on, and yet it seems to be correlated with quite the dramatic curve downwards. In the low-gov days (e.g. the early 20th century) the curve wasn't all that steep". You need to have some argument there, it's not just self-evident that the downward curve is more due to capitalism than to government.
August 17, 2015, 7:37 amkcom:
I came upon this quote in a New York Post article shortly after making my post above. The article is about the opening of the US Embassy in Cuba.
Felix Lopez, a locksmith from Havana, leaned on the security gate outside the embassy to get a view of the ceremony. He openly wondered how much more progress he might see.
“They say it will happen over the long term, but if the term is really long, I’m not going to see it. I’m 65 years old,” Lopez said. “This is a population of seniors. Both sides need to hurry up because every day there is greater need.”
He wants his government to hurry up and get out-of-the-way of progress.
August 17, 2015, 7:46 amCogniscentum:
Funny how communists can switch to fascism at the drop of a hat, but we are always assured that the two are polar opposites.
August 17, 2015, 8:09 amGeorg Thomas:
Citing post-Mao China, of all places, as an instance of poverty
reduction largely explicable in terms of political abstinence by a
non-interventionist state only goes to show the extent of self-deceit
among some libertarians, who chose to be by definition incapable of
explaining the contribution of the state to historically manifest
progress.
Their dogmatic formula is this: the state is bad, lesser poverty is good, hence: the state can have nothing to do with it.
But
since Mao's death, China continues to be ruled to this day by a heavily
invasive, strongly interventionist Communist party. In countless ways
does the state contribute to the change in question, on the highest
level of politics - e.g. by ordaining greater economic freedom - and on
lower levels of enforcement - e.g. by altering the law to promote
private property, by carrying out administrative reforms to support
commercial practices and so.
Insight into this has nothing to do with
August 17, 2015, 8:25 amstate adulation, it is simply a matter of understanding the real
picture - the full picture of the conditions and the stage of development of liberty in China.
MrJest:
That's because the ones who assure us of that are hiding something.
August 17, 2015, 10:00 amAnn_In_Illinois:
In terms of propaganda (what they say they'll do), they're very different. In terms of the system itself and what they actually do, fascism is just communism-light.
The best way to measure economies is on a force-choice continuum. Market systems allow individuals to make their own choices (while the government enforces contracts and makes sure everyone follows the rules, like a neutral referee for a sporting competition). Communism, fascism, socialism and other forms of collectivism involve a few people at the top forcing their own choices on everyone.
August 17, 2015, 10:16 amAnn_In_Illinois:
I hadn't seen this before. Thank you for posting it!
August 17, 2015, 10:17 amAnn_In_Illinois:
Young people have always tended to be drawn to simple answers. If things cost too much, why not just have a law that the price can't get too high? If we think wages are too low, why not just have a law that they can't be that low? It's all so easy....
August 17, 2015, 10:20 amAnn_In_Illinois:
The "full picture" is that the Party has been managing China's economy for more than 65 years. When it leaned towards more intervention, the economy did very poorly. As they've moved away from planning and towards a more market oriented approach, the economy has recovered from the earlier damage and even started to make some actual progress.
Yes, the government deserves credit for stepping back from much of the damage it used to inflict on its people. The government of North Korea deserves blame for the harm it is still causing, and the government of China deserves credit for causing less of it.
August 17, 2015, 10:28 amAnn_In_Illinois:
I think you're forgetting how wide-spread socialism was around the world in the 1950s to 1970s. Governments generally owned or controlled monopoly telephone companies, electricity providers and often airlines, banks, perhaps trucking... The US had one of the better socialist approaches - our regulation of AT&T gave it little or no incentive to innovate but at least gave it an incentive to build out a huge system (since it was allowed to earn a certain profit rate on its costs, so it worked to maximize costs). In other countries, government bureaucrats actually controlled the phone company, so people had to wait years just to get a fixed line into their home.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan set off a huge trend towards privatization, which encouraged innovation and allowed people to get what they wanted while actually paying less than before.
August 17, 2015, 10:35 amJohn O.:
IF only I could interview a Soviet Union farmer in 1936 and again in 1986. I can speculate with confidence that the first farmer would secretly complain about the dire situation his government imposed on them to meet a quota that for most is unobtainable and detrimental to good stewardship of the land. The other would be optimistic as he was given full control over his own lot years before and plant his fields knowing he can do more for himself by practicing better stewardship of the land for his long term benefit as he is paid for more for improving yield. One of the biggest unheard revolutions in the Soviet Union was the near revolt of all the collective farmers who put up staunch resistance to the bad practices of the Stalin-era, they won considerable ground in the aftermath of the Stalin's death but it took decades to reduce government interference of the agricultural industry to allow outputs to finally catch up to what the US had been outputting. Even then by 1986, the Soviet Union still depended on receiving imports of Western grain, primarily American, but the share needed had decreased as domestic productivity improved.
August 17, 2015, 10:57 amTerenc Blakely:
Actually, communism, fascism and socialism are all statist political systems. They only have a few policy differences between them and the degree of brutality they are willing to use to enforce their policies.
August 17, 2015, 11:01 amGeorg Thomas:
Hello Ann,
The point I am trying to make is this: over the past 65 years, the government in China has not ceased to interfere with society and the economy at all. The improvements are not correlated with a disappearance (or an enormous reduction) of state participation in society and the economy; but with changes in the targets, tools, and contents of state involvement.
In a modern economy, the libertarian dream of less and less (some sort of absolute reduction of) government is not attainable. Liberty cannot be had without extensive state involvement. What matters is the nature of that involvement. To assume responsibility for freedom requires comprehension of this, so that one is able to discern good from bad government policies, and become politically active in support of good policies.
Look at the reality of the Chinese entrepreneur, study his everyday life and probe into the details of running a firm, and you will be overwhelmed by the number of state-induced and government-enforced rules and regulations.
Hernando de Soto has looked at these details in countries the world over; consult his findings to appreciate that what most of the Third World needs is more, far more of the right kind of government to get out of poverty, rather than to have the state stand off.
Try here: http://www.amazon.de/The-Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Everywhere/dp/0465016154
August 17, 2015, 12:55 pmOpinionated_Vogon:
Polar opposites? Fascism is National Socialism, where Communism is International Socialism. They are brothers.
August 17, 2015, 2:53 pmCogniscentum:
Fraternal twins.
August 17, 2015, 3:14 pm