Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Big Government (or any Government) Will Never Lead to Prosperity

Big Government (or any Government) Will Never Lead to Prosperity
by Alex Merced

What we constantly get told in some form or other, is that you need government for things to work... but in all reality things work in spite of government. It's like when your a kid and you want something, all the rules in the world won't stop you from trying.

For Example, two countries that are catching up very quickly if not surpassing the US and Europe in economic power are China and India, arguably their governments are bigger and more coercive in scope of control. You can take the economist approach and see that spending as a share of GDP is vastly less than the US, but what I want to take a look as is the rules they govern with, not so much the spending.

China: By having it's non-democratic central government, the current leadership in China has LIBERALIZED a lot of it's economic policy and up until recently has focused on having a savings economy. While it's intervention in the supply of savings has and will cause problems, it couldn't of done it without somewhere to invest those savings in which the US more than glad to play the role which arguably leads to more problems for the US as the Spending economy. Another aspect to take a look at is Hong Kong, once the best bastians of Free Marketeering on the globe which played it's role in sparking the economic growth in the region if not being the Seed that grew into it.

India: This country is known for some of the largest amount of red tape and barriers to entry of any country, with buildings filled with stacks of pending applications for all sorts of things. Yet no one can honestly make the argument that the excessive beuracracy has led to it's quickening growth. So while the same type of Liberalization we see in China isn't in india, a system of corruption and bribery has developed to supercede the beuracracy and foster a freer market... essentially a black market for merely "permission" to enter and participate in commerce.

People will never be diverted from purposeful action no matter what the rules, every rule in the US either eventually is found to have loophole or has some built into it initially. What keeps people honest is their respect for boundries which comes from their own self developed ethical framework. So if we care about what people do in their social and business lives we may affect more change by discussing principles to live life by than about which rules we should establish that people will ignore if their principles allow.

1 comment:

  1. Good point, in fact I just published a book on this exact topic: America's Youth vs. Big Government. Check it out on Amazon.com

    ReplyDelete

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