The Case for Capitalism, Part I

1865

by Dan Mitchell

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.

For what it’s worth, nobody on the left has ever come up with a response to my never-answered question.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a public policy economist in Washington. He’s been a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, an economist for Senator Bob Packwood and the Senate Finance Committee, and a Director of Tax and Budget Policy at Citizens for a Sound Economy. His articles can be found in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and Washington Times. Mitchell holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. Original article can be viewed here.

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