This video from Dan Hannan crams 10,000 years of human history into 5 minutes. We learn about the “stationary bandit” of government and find out how our ancestors endured pervasive oppression and misery.
But there’s a happy ending to the story. It’s called capitalism.
There are many useful insights in this video.
We learn why it was important to replace arbitrary government with the “rule of law” so that property rights could be protected and so that people wanting to buy and sell no longer had to get permission from the state.
And once capitalism was unleashed beginning a few hundred years ago, living standards dramatically improved (these videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey have lots of evidence).
Hannan makes the all-important point that capitalism is the opposite of exploitation. It enriches people, but also liberates them.
And, as indicated by one of my favorite quotes from Walter Williams, it means we help ourselves by helping others.
As Hannan concludes, “the free market is the fairest and justest model yet devised.”
P.S. Not everyone has the same definition of fair and just, so I’ll simply observe that market-oriented nations always and easily out-perform state-controlled economies.
- West Germany vs. East Germany.
- Czechoslovakia vs Austria after World War II.
- Poland after the collapse of communism.
- Chile vs. Argentina vs. Venezuela
- Hong Kong vs. Cuba
- North Korea vs. South Korea
- Cuba vs. Chile
- Hong Kong vs. Argentina
- Singapore vs. Jamaica
- United States vs. Hong Kong and Singapore
- Botswana vs. other African nations
For what it’s worth, nobody on the left has ever come up with a response to my never-answered question.
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Image credit: Jacob Bøtter | CC BY 2.0.
