There is no sense living in a free country without prosperity. Think Klaus Schwab of the global elites, “You will own nothing but be happy.” How charming.
If we want to own something, we should understand the system that creates prosperity and then protect it. Are you aware that many economists have no idea how prosperity is created? Their fallback position is “it’s complicated.”
No, it is not.
We come from nature, from planet Earth. Understanding nature gives us a starting point for the mechanics of prosperity. Students of nature have described thousands of systems, but none have ever gotten to nature’s true foundations. Not even AI.
A tenet of the environmental movement is “there is no waste in nature.” The obvious question, then, is if there is no waste, what is the mechanism that drives it out?
Competition drives waste out of nature.
People understand competition and they understand waste. What they don’t understand is that the two are inextricably connected like opposite ends of a seesaw. When competition goes up, waste goes down, and vice versa. Since there is no waste, nature is a perfect competitive system.
The competition/waste connection gets you a long way to understanding the operation of nature but there is a very necessary third fundamental; everything moves to ease.
You can prove this by going to a national park. There, signs read, “Do not feed the animals.” Why? Because if you start feeding the animals, they will stop feeding themselves. Everything moves to ease!
We can apply these three fundamentals of nature to the two great systems unique to humans, the marketplace and government.
We easily see that the marketplace operates essentially like nature. It, too, is a competitive system that eliminates waste. Everything about the marketplace is based on a move to ease. Why trade if it doesn’t make your life easier?
Government, on the other hand, is singular, meaning there can be no competition. No competition means there is no mechanism to eliminate waste. It is a feature of the system. As for a “move to ease,” take a moment and think about government employees...enough said!
The foundations of nature prove government cannot create prosperity because a non-competitive system can only waste. Take that Klaus and all you other global elites!
The only way prosperity can be created is in a competitive system such as the marketplace, where competition continually eliminates waste. But there is a caveat: the marketplace can only create prosperity when government lets it. This is because the functions of the marketplace and government overlap.
When humans first set foot on Earth, we automatically began to trade. The marketplace happened naturally. Government on the other hand was invented. When we formed groups we began making rules. Eventually, formal government became the rule maker as well as the rule enforcer, a perfect formula for arbitrary power. Human history has shown all governments tend to grow and over time become arbitrary.
At our beginning, we had what is now called anarchy, the absence of law and order. Later on, as government grew, we learned about despotism or arbitrary government power. Both anarchy and despotism distort the marketplace. For the creation of prosperity, the marketplace needs to be somewhere in the middle. It must be protected from “survival of the fittest,” (anarchy), while also being protected from the arbitrary power of over bearing government.
When the marketplace is between these extremes, people can work without fear that the fruits of their labor will be stolen by bandits, or taken by government fiat.
This, of course, is the entire reason for a strong constitution. A good one protects law and order, while at the same time keeping the enforcer of laws—i.e. government—structurally limited. In America, we rely on our Constitution to keep the marketplace distortion free, which allows not only the creation of prosperity, but encourages it.
Our Constitution was a watershed moment in world history. Our country became amazingly prosperous, seemingly overnight, and nobody knew why.
It’s simple. Our Constitution protected the marketplace, allowing everyone to engage in trade. Its framework prevented lawlessness, as well as arbitrary government overreach. The marketplace was allowed to work—and it worked wonderfully—bringing a prosperity never before seen in human history.
That simple system is freedom. If you can keep it.
