I said in my last post that my next two post would be about FDR. The next day the tax bill was passed and my Facebook feed was flooded with nonsense about the bill. In research for a blog post to sort some of that nonsense out I came across “America and the ‘Original Position” by Jonah Goldberg. It is too insightful, timely, and well written not to share it with you immediately. Enjoy!
A comment about it: Goldberg says, “Human ingenuity is the engine of wealth creation, and there is no other.” I complete subscribe to that claim. My faithful readers, however, may recall that in “Income Inequality Is More Than It’s Cracked Up To Be,” I said, “… that income inequality is the engine of wealth creation (prosperity). In fact, the greater the income inequality, the higher the engine’s horsepower, i.e., the more rapidly prosperity accelerates. (The extreme importance of the pace of wealth creation is also discussed in my blog on Wealth. In a nutshell, improvements in standard of living increase exponentially as the pace of wealth creation increases linearly.)” Rather than codger and impose on you another analogy to rationalize the two “engines” of wealth creation (income inequality is the gasoline?), suffice it to say that both working together are what enables massive rapid wealth creation.
I liken income inequality to function similarly to a battery. If the battery has all of its electrons distributed equally across it, it is considered hazardous waste. It’s the natural compulsion of an individual particle to find a path to its goal that makes the device function. Hope is the force that charges the economy, not satiation.