From Jeff Tucker:
Quote:
Meanwhile, you probably saw that Republicans are making hay out of President Obama's statement: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." Defenders of the president immediately cried foul: Read the sentence in the context of his entire speech.
That's what I did. You know what? It is far worse in context. If an American president has ever before said something so insulting and disparaging toward an essential American idea (free enterprise), I've not heard it. It's an absolutely chilling speech.
Underneath his speech was a profound loathing of private initiative. No matter what you have done in life, the president thinks the government should get the credit. And why? Because the government built the Hoover Dam (in 1935!), the Golden Gate Bridge (in 1937, built and funded by private funds!), went to the moon (43 years ago!) and invented the Internet (it was privatized in 1995, and only then became mainstream!).
People say that I shouldn't be shocked at this rhetoric. I can't help it. The whole world as we know it is built by human hands operating in a market, yet this guy can't see it. To say the government is the source of prosperity is like saying that the ticks are keeping the dog alive.
Regardless, the market isn't going anywhere. It responds to whatever the reality is, whether distorted by government interventions or not. What will be the end result of the incredible and relentless interventions over the last five years? Whatever it is, it will not be good.
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It's individuals voluntarily working together that built the world. Not government taking and redirecting resources to wasteful government programs that only benefit politicians and those with the right political connections.
In a free market, it's not those who are smartest or work hardest or have the right political connections that make the most money. It's those who best serve their fellow man.
If we use Rothbard's definition of a free market:
"Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at."
Then, under such a system, the only way to make money is to actually offer your potential customers something they value.
Think of the 10 sites you use most on the internet. Who built them and who's running them? Is it the government or is it some individual or group of individuals who voluntarily used their time and resources to build that site?
Who built GFY? The government?
Who built Wikipedia? The government?
Who built apache, wordpress, drupal, php, perl, firefox, chrome, photoshop, thunderbird, flashfxp, openssh, acrobat, nero, ms office, kmeleon, media player classic home cinema edition, fsviewer,...? The government?
Even if you don't like to use that definition of a free market, even if you think our current system is somehow a free market, you'll have to admit that all those great things we voluntarily use every day are not the result of some government bureaucrat or government committee taking away resources and deciding how to use them. All those great things are the result of the voluntary cooperation between individuals.
An advocate of a free market does not want every individual to do everything alone. No, the question is: "how do we work together?". Do we want a system of voluntary, mutual beneficial exchanges or do we want a system where the government takes away resources and spends them in such away that it only benefits the government, the bureaucracy behind it, the lobbyists that inevitably flock to it and the politicians that are eventually all the same?