Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Politics, The United States, Unemployment | Tags: Capitalism and Freedom, Economic News, January Jobs
American employers posted nearly 7.6 million job openings in January — one million more job openings than there were unemployed people looking for a job.
Granted, that doesn’t mean that the unemployed had the right skills for the jobs where they live, nor that the open jobs were where the unemployed live, but as a general report on how the economy is doing, it’s very encouraging.
Not, of course, to the Left. They’re busy blaming President Trump for the mosque attack in New Zealand. But then the Democrats have always hated all Republican presidents. With Donald Trump, they’re just somewhat more extreme than usual. Democrats don’t understand capitalism. They are sure that Republican tax cuts just go to the rich, as a payoff to their friends. Freedom is an alien concept.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Immigration, National Security, The United States | Tags: All About Immigration, Capitalism and Freedom, Change for the Better
William Voegeli, from The Pity Party:
” In contrast to America, countries like Canada and Australia treat immigration the way Harvard treats college admission or the New England Patriots treat the NFL draft as a way to get the talented that can benefit the institution and keep out the untalented. Here in America, we increasingly treat immigration as if it were a sacred civil right possessed by 7 billion foreigners.”
Economist Dierdre McCloskey:
In the countries that most enthusiastically embraced capitalism, some two hundred years ago, real per-capita economic growth has increased by 1.5 percent annually. Owing to the miracle of compound interest, this increase has meant a 19-fold increase in living standards over the past two centuries, which, she contends, is a “change in the human condition” that “ranks with the first domestication of plants and animals and the building of the first towns.” … this enormous economic result has a cause that was cultural rather than economic. Humans did not suddenly become more acquisitive or creative. Rather “when people treat the marketers and inventors as having some dignity and liberty, innovation takes hold.” The new respectability of bourgeois life, the belief that the creativity of capitalism’s creative destruction more than offset its destruction, was the decisive attitudinal change that rendered human life in the past two centuries decisively different from what it had been throughout the preceding millennia.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Economics, Free Markets, Free Speech, Freedom, History, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, The United States | Tags: Capitalism and Freedom, Free Speech Free People, Incompatible with "Social Justice"
Events in the world continue to astound. Starving, desperate Venezuela is supposedly so pleased with Nicholas Maduro that they have elected him to another term as president dictator, so they can starve longer. In Turkey, Recip Erdogan has apparently decided to be a dictator. And China’s President Xi Jinping also serves as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the Communist Party has decided to allow him to reign indefinitely, instead of the two terms he originally planned on.
So perhaps it should not be surprising that New York magazine would carry an article titled “America’s Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy” by someone named Eric Levitz. You really need to read the whole thing to grasp just where leftist minds are wandering.
American democracy is unwell; on this much, President Trump’s detractors can agree.
But when they turn to the tasks of identifying our republic’s symptoms, naming its illness, and writing a prescription, different factions of “the resistance” produce divergent diagnoses.
One group — comprised of comparative politics scholars, liberal pundits, and NeverTrump conservatives — have their eyes fixed on Donald Trump. They see the moral cowardice of a Republican elite that declined to deny an illiberal demagogue their nomination, or to abandon him in the general election, or to let the investigation into his campaign proceed unimpeded. They observe a president who relentlessly assails the independence of federal law enforcement,veracity of official election results and a conservative base that takes his lies to be self-evident. And, pulsing beneath it all, they discern the rise of a hyperpartisanship that’s leading each party’s elected officials to eviscerate informal constraints on their authority — and each party’s voters, to believe that the other side has no legitimate claim to power.
It’s quite clear that when he writes about ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ he is not writing about anything familiar to us. Capitalism is to do with corporations which are evil, I won’t even attempt to explain his delusions, you’ll have to read it for yourself. But it becomes clearer just why it often seems like we are speaking different languages. We are.
A reader reminded me of a post from 2014 that seems appropriate, titled “The Ultimate Global Antipoverty Program”
Extreme poverty in the world fell to 15% in 2011, from 36% in 1990. The credit goes to the spread of capitalism. The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world. An 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years.
The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991. …
The reduction in world poverty has attracted little attention because it runs against the narrative pushed by those hostile to capitalism. The Michael Moores of the world portray capitalism as a degrading system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yet thanks to growth in the developing world, world-wide income inequality—measured across countries and individual people—is falling, not rising, as Branco Milanovic of City University of New York and other researchers have shown.
So what accounts for that? “It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.
Freedom and opportunity make all the difference. Some people just can’t grasp the idea of freedom, they can only see a world that would be better if only they were in charge.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Health Care | Tags: Capitalism and Freedom, Competition Creates Success, The Free Market
Once upon a time, in the first days of November of 2010, all that was right about the world was shattered by one of the biggest electoral swings in congressional history. Democrats are still trying to grasp what has happened.
Conservatives don’t particularly dislike Liberals, but they detest their ideas. Liberals detest Conservatives and don’t understand their ideas at all.
Conservatives believe that reality suggests we are all flawed human beings, who must be set free to learn from our mistakes and grasp for opportunity. We make a lot of mistakes, but we turn around and correct them, muddle through and do amazing things in the process. The great innovations usually originate in a single mind, not in a committee.
A transaction in the free market does not happen unless both parties find it to their advantage. Competition keeps prices low and fosters innovation. Competition increases the quality and choices of products and services. Competition is hard work for businesses, and they have to fight for customers. They have to keep track of what their competitors are doing, and find ways to innovate. Because it is hard, they lobby lawmakers to constrain the free markets in which they originally achieved success.
The most effective way to control capitalists is through competition, not regulation. Liberals are sure that rapacious big business will cheat customers, abuse workers and charge too much if uncontrolled. In the free market, who wants to be a customer of such a business? They’ll go where they’re treated well.
Liberals offer to control the forces let loose in the free market. But control is seldom evenly applied. Those in control will, because they are human, favor one business over another. Or they will favor the unions, or pick winners and losers, and subsidize a favored business while ignoring the competition.
Liberals are suspicious of competition. They have tried hard to stamp it out in the schools, eliminating winners and losers. Everybody gets a medal and nobody is a winner— lording it over the others. But if there are no winners, there is no point in trying to be best. It is failures that make us work harder to succeed.
President Obama said that “the free market is the greatest force of economic progress in human history,” but he didn’t mean it. No president in history has worked so hard to expand state control over health care, energy, the environment, the financial sector, education, and American business. If the free market fits into Obama’s vision of America, he hasn’t explained how.
Obama assumes that progress begins with the administration of government money to jump-start a business. Government investment will somehow foster innovation and create jobs and prosperity. “Government money” is not taken as seriously as is the money from the pockets of individual investors. If you run short, there is usually more government money to be had, because failure would make the giver of government money look bad. Individual investors do more due diligence in the first place, and monitor operations more carefully— it’s their money at stake.
Nobody ever said that the free market is easy. It’s hard, but it works. We have evidence over and over— from history, from developing countries, from our own successes and failures.
We are fallible human beings, yet we rise to opportunity. One fallible human being’s success opens doorways for many more. The United States of America has been a beacon to the world in demonstrating the freedom and possibilities of the free market, and more and more nations are growing and prospering because of it.
How very odd that in” the worst recession since the Great Depression,” we should forget the simple rules that made us Americans.
