Monday, August 25, 2014

Why not try free enterprise..........................?

My favorite optimist makes that suggestion to all those statists out there.  The sure sign of a state directed economy is sluggishness.  The sure sign of free enterprise is................well, you know.  Two excerpts:

"Estonia has been the top performing of the former Soviet colonies because Mart Laar, the historian who became prime minister in 1992 at the age of 32, had read only one book on economics, Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and was in his own words “so ignorant” that he thought flat taxes, privatisation and the abolition of tariffs and subsidies constituted normal policy in the West."

"As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in her forthcoming book Bourgeois Equality, the chief beneficiaries of free enterprise revolutions are the poor. As a result of what she calls “the great enrichment” since 1800, she says 'millions more have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, lower child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university and respect. Never had anything similar happened, not in the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome, not in ancient Egypt or medieval China.'"

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