that dinner-table parental advice is difficult to apply to the earth’s impoverished masses. There are also billions of people who don’t have property rights, not to mention property. Or the property rights are arbitrary, and the property can be taken away by anybody with a gun or a government title. These billions of people have trouble being responsible because being responsible means thinking of the future. They haven’t got one. Rule of law is crucial. And it has to be good law, not Albania’s Law of Lek. So if what our parents tell us is going to be globally effective, Mom and Dad will need to bring world leaders into the dining room. All the presidents, prime ministers, dictators, generals, chairman of idiot political parties, lunatic guerrilla chieftains, and fanatical heads of crazed religious sects will need to squeeze around the imitation Queen Anne mahogany veneer (with extra leaves in) and get a real talking-to. Then there is democracy to be considered. Democracy is a bulwark against tyranny—unless the demos get tyrannical. People can vote themselves poor, as the Swedes seem to be trying to do. Now all the people on the planet are coming over to the house. And when they get there, what they’re going to do is . . . exactly what we did. They’re not going to listen. There is a worldwide pigheadedness about money. There is a willful and even belligerent ignorance concerning ways and means. There is a heartfelt and near- universal refusal to understand the basic economic principles behind the creation of wealth. Not all this ignorance is irrational. Some people profit from economic privation. Economists, for instance. John Maynard Keynes couldn’t have become a big shot, guiding government intervention in business and finance, if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression. And Alan Greenspan is a success because we all lost our wallets when inflation scared our pants off. We fear the power that others have over us, and wealth is power. We’re afraid that Kathie Lee Gifford§§§§§ is going to make us sew jogging suits for thirty cents an hour. But are the rich really scarier than the poor? Take a midnight stroll through a fancy neighborhood, then take a midnight stroll a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Sure, we can get in trouble in Monte Carlo. We can lose at roulette. We can get suckered into a shady business deal with Princess
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