At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
Socialist planned economies — the common ownership of the means of production — interfere with price and other market signals in a million ways. They suppress or eliminate profit motives that drive people to learn and improve.
I came to realize that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out. If you want to run a rental car company, capitalism has a whole bevy of market and price signals and feedback loops that tell you what kind of cars people want to rent, where to put your locations, how many cars to order. It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.
The state nurtures prosperity when it helps people become capitalists. The state causes incredible levels of misery when it gets too far inside the decision-making processes of capitalists. It creates enormous misery when it cripples the motivational system that drives capitalism. Its causes enormous misery when it meddles with the relentless learning system that market mechanisms make possible.
According to a team of researchers led by Raj Chetty, in 1970, 90 percent of 30-year-olds were making more than their parents had at that age. By 2010, only 50 percent were.
Today, the real argument is not between capitalism and socialism. We ran that social experiment for 100 years and capitalism won. It’s between a version of democratic capitalism, found in the U.S., Canada and Denmark, and forms of authoritarian capitalism, found in China and Russia.
Favorite quote: “Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.”
My socialist sympathies didn’t survive long once I became a journalist. I quickly noticed that the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn’t because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated.
Capitalism creates a relentless learning system. Socialism doesn’t.
Over the past century, planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and scarcity. What’s worse is what happens when the political elites learn what you can do with that scarcity. They turn scarcity into corruption. When things are scarce, you have to bribe government officials to get them. Soon, everybody is bribing. Citizens soon realize the whole system is a fraud. Socialism produces economic and political inequality as the rulers turn into gangsters.
Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.
At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
Missing Reference