Your life is filled with many needs and desires. Subsistence requires meeting your basic needs. Prosperity grows from the fulfillment of desire.
You could survive with very minimal housing and food. You don’t really “need” the computer and Internet access you’re using to read this. Tonight you will retire to a home that is much larger and nicer than what you require to survive, eat a meal more tasty and filling than your essential dietary requirements, and enjoy entertainment that you could live without.
Our mutual ambition to do better than the minimum, for ourselves and our families, leads to the hard work and innovation which become the fertile soil of prosperity.
How will you go about meeting your needs, and fulfilling your desires? Free people earn both what they need, and what they want. Totalitarians dismiss the desires of their captive populations, and allocate essential needs through force.
Modern socialism promises a mixed solution: the State will allocate needs, to “eliminate poverty” and promote “social justice,” while establishing a game preserve of economic freedom where citizens can pursue government-approved desires.
This is commonly sold to the public with promises that they’ll be more capable of chasing their dreams, once the State has assumed control of the grubbier aspects of life for them. They are promised many “free” benefits, such as health care, education, guaranteed wages, and a generous welfare safety net. All of these things will be financed through money taken from the wealthy, who can easily afford to shoulder the expense. Whatever money the State doesn’t need can be kept by the people, with a greater percentage “given” to those with less income, to fulfill their desires.
This never works. The amount of energy and innovation required to achieve true prosperity is far greater than statists imagine. The government itself produces nothing. When it tries to raise money by selling services, in the manner of a free market corporation, the result is usually abject failure. (Have you checked up on the U.S. Postal Service lately?)
The only resource of the State is power, which it uses to compel obedience. Political control of the economy inevitably boils down to making promises that other people have to keep.
Read the rest here.
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