making finite goods meet infinite wants. Unless the fair society generates tremendous economic growth—which societies that put fairness first have trouble doing—the goods will come from redistribution. Try rephrasing the rights statement thus: “People have a right to my food, a right to my housing, and a right to my good job for my decent pay.” Accepting the free market allows us to avoid the political abuse and financial mismanagement inherent in trying to design an economy that’s fair. It also allows us to see that economies can’t be designed. Economics is the measurement of how human nature affects the material world. The market is “heartless.” So are clocks and yardsticks. Saying that economic problems are the result of the free market’s failure is like gaining twenty pounds and calling the bathroom scale a bum. Adam Smith recognized that markets are self-organizing. Man has a “general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange,” wrote Smith. If people are protected from coercion by other people, and from coercion by that agglomeration of other people known as the state, human brains and greed create economic growth. “The strength of the mastiff is not in the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel,” wrote Smith. “Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another.” I had thought that economic problems were the result of ignorance about economics. I was wrong again. I asked a friend, who’s knowledgeable in the field: “Why is the concept of the ‘invisible hand’ so difficult to comprehend?” He said, “It’s invisible.” The hardest thing to understand about economics is that it doesn’t need to be understood. My beatnik friends and I, when we were in college, were perfectly justified in expending our intellectual energy on love and death instead of money. But there was one thing that we did need to learn. And still do. And it’s a piece of knowledge that seems to contradict psychology, life experience, and the dictates of conscience: Economics is not zero sum. There is no fixed amount of wealth. That is, if you have too many slices of pizza, I don’t have to eat the box. Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking. True, at any given moment, there is only so much wealth to go around. But wealth is based on productivity. Without productivity, there wouldn’t be any
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