As readers know, last Monday’s column boiled down an economic law to one sentence: “When the costs of goods and services are reduced, the money supply can be increased proportionately without damaging a state or its people.”
Every human endeavor is done more cheaply by people who have the freedom to wage war on old technologies. Some nations, cultures, and religions relish this. “We can do better!”, they tell each other. “We can make things more cheaply, thereby providing people with more goods and services.”
In the United States and Europe, mass production destroyed jobs even as it provided more goods and services for the poor. Welfare systems quickly set about making poverty more livable. The poor were given air conditioners, telephones, food stamps, TVs, automobiles, housing, medical care, and all manner of things that that, a generation before, had been proudly owned by aristocrats.
Then, poor people from all over the world began coming to freer countries. They brought with them the old customs and cultures that taught them to hate smart people who did smart things.
Frankly, they’re making a mess of everything.
