Would you rather have an economy where we all own the shovel in common? This would mean a government Department of Shovels to oversee shovel allocation. The federal shovels would go first, I’m sure, to the “shovel- deprived” even if they live on the 10th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan with nothing to dig up but the parquet flooring in the front hall. That’s the basis of an unfree no- market economy. The Millennials and Generation Z have grown up in strange times, times that have muddled free market lessons. For people in their early 30s – the age at which you give up on the garage band, have the dermatologist patch the hole where your lip stud went, and start looking for regular income while dad turns your old bedroom at home into a man cave – economic life began about the same time as the 2008 economic crash. Both the George W. Bush and the Barack Obama administrations insisted that nothing but massive government intervention could rescue the economy. The only way to save the free market was to limit its freedoms. To further confuse that free market “teachable moment,” economic growth (COVID aside) has been steady ever since the 2008 to 2009 investment banking collapse. This was the result – as all economic growth is – of work. But it’s hard not to be tempted into a “ post hoc ergo propter hoc ” fallacy and think, “Because economic growth happened after government intervention, government intervention caused economic growth.” This is like thinking, “Because I got pregnant after the office Christmas party, office Christmas parties are how babies are made.”
Anyway, you know the kids I mean. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, born 1989.) They think wealth comes from the top down... that wealth is distributed from above by benevolent government, by grudging multinational corporations, by random billionaires paying (not enough!) taxes, by philanthropic largess, or – if the kids are lucky – by their parents. They think everyone has more or less the same claim on this wealth... Descending as it does from the mysterious economic firmament, wealth should fall alike on the just and the unjust. Everyone ought to get drenched when it rains pennies from heaven. The kids have no idea that wealth comes from the bottom up. Wealth is not distributed , wealth is made . And the process of making it is called work . Work consists in taking something of lower economic value (a shovel) and using it to create something of higher economic value (a ditch for the Keystone XL pipeline). Except forget that example... The Keystone XL pipeline has been canceled – presumably by the same people who think that crude oil, like money, arrives magically from the sky. But it’s still important to have the right to own a shovel and the right to go to work with that shovel in whatever way is most profitable to you. That’s the basis of a free market economy – whether the shovel you have happens to be an actual call-a-spade-a-spade shovel, a retail business, a restaurant, a skill, a specialty, or an accumulation of capital ready to be put to work.
8
July 2021
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online