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Archive of posts published in the tag: Wealth and Poverty

Capitalism Updated

Progressivism can be viewed as socialism lite, paying homage to the great progress of capitalism while acknowledging some of the limitations of a free market. Social and economic theories develop, mature and evolve as they face the hard tests of

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Velocity is Freedom

The big prize at Freedom Fest was George Gilder, most famously noted for his Wealth and Poverty. His new book is The Scandal of Money. Gilder wrote of travelling to China with Milton Friedman and respectfully challenges many of Friedman’s

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The Racism of the Intelligentsia

There is something, evidently, in the human mind, even when carefully honed at Oxford or the Sorbonne, that hesitates to believe in capitalism: in the enriching mysteries of inequality, the inexhaustible mines of the division of labor, the multiplying miracles

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Debauchers of Wealth

A pot of honey attracts flies as well as bears. Bureaucrats, politicians, bishops, raiders, robbers, revolutionaries, short-sellers, managers, business writers, and missionaries all think they can invest money better than its owners.  Owners are besieged on all sides by aspiring

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Creating New Expertise

An economy can continue to grow only if its profits are joined with entrepreneurial knowledge. In general, wealth can increase only if the people who create it control it. Divorce the financial profits from the learning process and the economy

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Bad Luck

Whatever the state of inequality of incomes, it is dwarfed by the inequality of contributions to human advancement.  Robert Heinlein wrote, “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances that permit this norm to be exceeded- here and

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The New Frontier

In the United States today we are facing the usual calculus of impossibility, recited by the familiar aspirants to a master plan.  It is said we must abandon economic freedom because our frontier is closed; because our biosphere is strained;

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The Perverse Feedback of Free Goods

The most obvious rule of social science is that people will abuse any free good. Regardless of what politicians promise to gullible voters, government services cannot ultimately escape the constraints of supply and demand.  A price of “free” evokes unbounded

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The Destruction of Entrepreneurial Knowledge

Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work. It is these capitalists,

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Stable Money

As Steve Forbes stresses, the role of currencies is to serve as a standard of value, representing a measuring stick of the worth of goods and services.  “Floating the currency is like floating the clock.  Let’s say you floated the

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Socialism, not Capitalism, Is Based Greed

Some implicitly accept the behavioral dream of  “Skinner box” economics of stimulus and response, in which lower rates impart a stimulus of reward for more work and risk-taking, yielding more revenues for the government.  A successful economy, however, is driven

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Aligning Knowledge With Power

The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative [supposed] public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments bring both a financial and epistemic [knowledge] yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they

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Propping Up the Past in the Name of Progress

The problem of the United States comes not chiefly from its liabilities, serious though they are, but from the suffocating webs of government regulations and subsidies, pettifoggery (a quarrel about petty points)  and litigation that is devaluing the the assets

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Exhausting Creative Potential

George Gilder writes Unleash the Mind in National Review.  It is from his soon to be released update of his classic Wealth and Poverty. It is not the enlargement of incentives and rewards that generates growth and progress, profits and capital gains

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A System of Privileges and Bailouts

The war against the rich thus continues in the world’s wealthiest country.  It is a campaign now led and inspired by the declining rich, to arouse the currently poor against the insurgently successful business classes.  By their communicative skills and

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Quotes from Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder (new edition)

Economists ill-serve themselves by describing economics as being about the allocation of scarce resources.  It is about the creation of resources. Capitalism is more an information system than a incentive system. The key issue in economics is aligning knowledge with

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The Greater Risk

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk.  But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities ubiquitous in any society.  Rather than

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Inexhaustible Capital

The United States must overcome the materialist fallacy: the illusion that resources and capital are essentially things, which can run out, rather than products of human will and imagination, which in freedom are inexhaustible. This fallacy is one of the

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The Perpetual Crisis of Human Existence

Natural history is a saga not of balance but of convulsive changes, wiping out whole species left and right, transforming continents, evulsing mountains, and flooding vast plains and valleys.  There is no such thing as equilibrium, in ecology any more

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Demand and Supply, Greed and Giving

In economics, when demands is permitted to displace supply in the order of priorities, the result is a sluggish and uncreative economy, inflation, and a decline in productivity.  Such disorders afflict both our politics and our economics today. The problem

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