DENNIS CLAYSON | Posted: Sunday, February 3, 2008 12:00 am
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on the failure of liberal economics, based on actual worldwide experiments.
I mentioned at the time that the evidence in favor of economic freedom over socialism is much stronger than the evidence for global warming or any number of other beliefs held in so much reverence by our friends on the left.
The article turned out to be something of a psychological Rorschach test for many who seemed to read more from their own psyche into the article than anything I actually wrote.
Apparently I have been too subtle, so here is a clarification rendered as bluntly as good taste and respectful manners will allow.
First of all, economic freedom works. It works almost every time it is tried. Restraints on economic freedom don't work, and they fail almost every time they are tried.
The left in America have finally admitted that leftist despots like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Pol Pot, and assorted other tyrants in Cuba and North Korea destroyed their nations' economies and have made their own people poor.
But the faithful still hold to a thin thread of hope that socialism will create Nirvana by looking to isolated examples in Europe, and pointing fingers at people and groups that they believe are examples of failure, and which, in their cultural isolation, they believe to be conservative.
Here is a short list of misperceptions.
1. Business does not equal the free market. Businesses like free markets for themselves, but want a controlled market for everyone else. This is why you can't bury someone out under a tree until mortuaries and lawyers have taken their first cut.
2. Republican politicians are not necessarily conservative or free market advocates. The irony here is wonderful. Republicans gained power and began to spend like Democrats. The solution advocated by liberals is to throw the bums out and replace them with Democrats.
3. Capitalism is not the best economic system. Actually, a free communal economy would be superior. But as Marx so aptly pointed out, in the real world, only force will maintain the commune. Freedom works. Free markets work. Socialism demands restraint imposed by the wise on the less wise and those who would "oppress" the masses that the wise have adopted as children.
4. Socialized countries in Europe are less economically successful than they should be. A little explanation is needed here because European socialism has become a tenet of faith so embedded into liberal mythology that it is much like telling a Taliban warrior that there is no god.
The Heritage Foundation did a little study looking only at economic freedom. They evaluated countries based on all sorts of regressive stuff like an absolute right of property ownership, freedoms of movement for labor, capital, and goods, and an "absence of coercion or constraint of economic liberty beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself."
The top five freest countries in the world (which includes Ireland, Australia, and the U.S.) have an average GDP/person of about $44,000 a year.
The five freest countries in Europe (which includes Switzerland, Denmark, and Finland) have an average GDP/person of $37,800 a year.
The next five nations in Europe on this scale have a GDP/person of $34,500 a year. The next five after that (which includes France) have an average of $22,700.
The least free five nations in the world (which includes Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe) have an average GDP/person of only $4,400.
If you control for population, in the countries listed above, there is a drop of $250/person in average wealth for every one unit drop in rankings of economic freedom.
For example, France is ranked as the 48th most free economy in the world. If France changed to a free economy, it would be worth about $12,000 for each person in France every year.
In other words, France's romance (sounds like a song title) with socialism is costing a family of three about $36,000 a year in lost wealth.
But what is that filthy materialism worth compared to the socialist dream of creating the perfect person. The ideal man who increasingly appears to be a very angry drunk, who in an existentialistic funk, can't decide whether it is better to commit suicide or just get very angry and demand vengeance against any person or economic system that produces people richer than himself?