Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

The New Yorker style cartoon says, "My desire to remain well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."

Well, then, there is also the fact that the "news" would seem to be largely a matter of one's point of view. What is news?  And what shall we make of it? As it stands, the "news" is produced mostly by crony big businesses who comb the world high and low for every little thing that will arouse our fear, outrage, disgust, and our despair, while ignoring every evidence of the inspiring, the creative, and the amazing! 

Of these inspiring and astonishing wonderments, there is so much of it that one can truly argue that we live in an age of unprecedented opportunity, even in the face of the government's dreadful drag of collectivist insanity!

What?! We have a hundred thousand pages of government regulations, issued by unelected bureaucrats who wield life and death control over our actions, dictating the details of damn near everything that anybody can hope to do in the world.  How can I say that ours remains a realm of unprecedented opportunity?  

Because this opinion is the result of my observation of the arithmetic of the matter.  I don't disagree with the idea that government is profoundly destructive, but follow the math here. 

Start with the addition of the amazing creativity of entrepreneurs and inventors.  Their passion to create new ideas infuses the world with their astonishing new stuff. Subtract from this sum the destruction created by the dead hand of government, whose terrible interventions of the righteous, socialist, egalitarian destroyers, greatly slow the stream of invention and creativity.  I won't attempt to document every step of the positive case here, but it should suffice to ask you to compare the worlds of 1980 and 2015.

Do I need to invoke anything more than the advent of the world wide web, the internet, cell phones, and email?  I didn't even try hard to name things that have led to this radical transformation of the quality of our lives.  The difference is dramatic and profound.  

Government produces nothing that is not financed by its coercive takings from the citizens.  Everything government does is made possible by the wealth they take from the citizens by force, through taxation.  

At best, government succeeds when it creates the stable atmosphere in which the creative elements can bring their products to market, restrains the predators in our midst, negotiates the disputes among the well-intentioned, and repels the attacks of foreign invaders.  These are the functions of a legitimate government, in essence: the protection of life, liberty, and property--the protection of the individual rights of all its citizens. The civil order, and ours is arguably the most generous population in the history of the world, should take care of that small percentage of the population that is truly hapless, helpless, and deserving of our charity.    

Now think of how dramatically greater all this progress since 1980 might have been, absent the dead foot of government control, as opposed to the "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's formulation of how the successful pursuit of selfish interest must necessarily benefit the greater good.

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