Larry Elder demolishes the child's view of economics and throws in some much needed moral clarity in this short essay at FrontPageMagazine. Is America rich because it takes wealth from other nations? Only in Marxist fantasy land. In the real world all wealth has to be created. Nature does not provide more than raw materials, and even then you have to process those to get started on the road to a developing economy. The real reason America is rich is because we have something which many other countries have lacked. We have a free market economy, rule of law and private property rights. If you want to see economic growth, these are the things you need to have in place.
The Middle East has tons of oil, a valuable resource. But it remains one of the poorest parts of the world. The reason is that the Arab nations lack the freedoms named above. And slave populations do not become rich, especially when half of them cannot read and where creativity and innovation are punished by culture and law. In the Middle East, property rights and rule of law don't exist. Thus they remain at the level of a third world culture, except for the very few rulers at the top. The rest of the population remains mired in poverty. It is freedom and law which create the groundwork for a society such as ours in which progress is the rule rather than the exception. What poor nations need to import is the concept of democratic capitalism and individual rights.
No comments:
Post a Comment