AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

Even though it is not planned by any particular person or group of people, the outcome of the free market process can be seen all around us in the incredible standard of living we enjoy. When our country’s main health problem is obesity and not malnutrition, and it seems that everyone owns a cell phone, we are rather well off as a country.

The main problem we face now and moving forward is, will we allow free market capitalism to continue to increase our standard of living, or because we don’t like how wealth is “distributed” as a result of this process, will we ask Government to intervene in the free market system to make the distribution more “fair”, “fair” being defined by whom.

You can’t redistribute something that has not been distributed in the first place. As Thomas Sowell said, “wealth is produced, earned, saved, and spent, but it is not distributed.” The quest for the illusion of  “social justice”, will result in the steady erosion of our present standard of living, if the erosion hasn’t already started happening. The people who will be hurt the most by this steady erosion, will be the people the redistributionists say they want to help the most, the less fortunate. The consequences of Government actions won’t be what the interventionists had in mind.

Read previous post, “Government Intervention and its Consequences”.

Also read, “What Comes First Production or Consumption”.

And, “Government Intervention Distorts Market Signals, Unintended Consequences are the Result”.

This entry was posted on December 25, 2012 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Econ. 101, Government and Politics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Capitalism, Economic system, Free market, Standard of living, Unintended Consequences