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Wealth, markets and happiness — or how the arrogance of our rightwing screwed it up again
Gerard Jackson
We are still getting dopey articles from so-called economic commentators sagely telling us that wealth doesn’t bring happiness, which is pretty rich coming from a pampered bunch of asses that would scream bloody murder if they had to take wage cut. So why are we hearing this rubbish? Because economic growth brings wealth, and if wealth doesn’t bring happiness what’s the point of having growth? In other words, it just another lefty way of attacking economic progress.
Someone once famously said: “I’ve been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better”. This is some thing nearly everyone understands. Rich is better because it is healthier. Curiously enough the same commentators who push the wealth-doesn’t-bring-happiness line are the same bozos who complain that many Australians suffer deprivation because ..— wait for it — they have insufficient wealth. And these dolts consider themselves among the country’s intellectual elite.
Ignoring the all too obvious fact that we cannot measure happiness, these zealots and their useful idiots in the media never stop to ponder what the state of society would be in the absence of growth. It should have been abundantly clear to them that only rich countries can afford to maintain expensive medical establishments, fund resource consuming research establishments, train and keep teams of specialists, researchers, technicians, doctors, nurses, etc.
Only rich countries can provide high medical standards for all of their citizens, care for the aged, provide for the young and generate resources to protect the environment. Only the growing wealth of rich countries can create the kinds of opportunities that make social mobility the norm and give real meaning to the concept of equality and not the phony equality of the left.
Yes, Rich is better. But what makes a country rich? It has been quickly forgotten that the wealth we take for granted is really an aberration. Only during the last two centuries of man’s existence has the idea of everyone growing wealthy taken root. Our society, among others, has now reached the stage that an annual increase in national wealth is not only expected it is virtually considered a natural law of nature.
People not only expect to become better off each year, they are coming to demand it as a basic right. Yet the people and their leaders never ask the fundamental question: Where does the wealth come from? On the contrary, our politicians promise more and more while never exhibiting the slightest understanding of what it is they are promising. (Australia’s Treasurer is a good example of this breed of economic illiterate).
A country’s wealth is its means to produce more goods and services to satisfy the wants of its people. The means to produce these goods is called the capital structure. The structure is built, expanded and maintained with savings while the economy is driven by entrepreneurship, not posturing politicians, know-it-all academics and bumbling bureaucracies. Yet the critical role that entrepreneurship plays in driving the economy is scarcely recognized let alone understood.
Let me put it in English so plain that even politicians and journalists can understand it: savings fuel growth and entrepreneurship drives it. It follows from this observation that any policy hindering these forces will retard economic growth. And any policy that arrests their development will bring about increasing poverty.
(And this includes subsidizing so-called businessmen who can only grow rich by bleeding the taxpayer and through inside dealings at the expense of naïve shareholders. These men are nothing but parasites, of which Melbourne has more than its fair share).
Yet many people are prepared to vote for policies that would eventually destroy the very thing they want — prosperity. Ignorant politicians, unionists, academics and so-called journalists like Colebatch and Davidson of The Age and Steketee of The Australian who are continually promoting ideas that would eventually result in a drastic drop in living standards are among those who are misleading the public.
The truly frightening thing is not the ignorance and outright stupidity of these people but the complacency of those who arrogantly appointed themselves the sole right to defend the market against economic barbarians. Well they failed and failed dismally.
Our self-appointed guardians of the market have not only failed to convince the people of the benefits of the free market, they never even tried. They were going to succeed by persuading the ‘power brokers’, the ‘men of influence’. Or as the moronic Julian Sheezel, state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, and the string-pulling Michael Kroger put it only people who are “important and influential” really matter, people like Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun who knows even less economics than this pair of political flimflam artists.
How pathetic. Public opinion ultimately rules the political roost, not reasoned arguments. If politicians really want a lasting victory they must first win over public opinion. And they are not going to do this with some Herald Sun columnist covering their backsides for them while they continue to poison the party.
The most effective way any political party to gain lasting public acceptance for its policies, particularly where they related to economics, is to publicly challenge market critics at every opportunity and deconstruct their arguments. Not just once but every damned day of the week. Eventually, and it will take time, public opinion will swing behind the victor.
It will be won by those who are committed to victory and who are prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to achieve that end. These are people who have demonstrated commitment by spending their own time and their own money on a cause in which they believe.
It will not be won by anyone who misrepresents the market as a cold, unfeeling mechanical device that shifts people about as if they were chess pieces, who tells them that they should be grateful for what they can get and lump it and then dispenses with them when they are no longer of any use. Unfortunately, this is exactly the impression that most Australians have of the free market and Australia's free-market club — and it’s damn far from the truth.
Educating the public in the benefits of the market takes real effort, real work, real dedication. Worst of all, for some, it might actually mean having to mix with members of the hoi polloi instead of hobnobbing with “important and influential” people, especially if they live in Toorak mansions. And that would be just too much of a sacrifice for these self-proclaimed heroes. (What other bunch of clowns would have the public chutzpah to award each other medals for “courage above and beyond the call of duty”?)
This gang of pretentious intellectual snobs took a cause vital to this country’s future and turned it into a self-serving social club that successfully alienated the public and invited defeat. If this crew of supercilious know-it-alls were not so arrogantly insular they would have taken careful note of von Mises’ wise warning that Democracy
cannot prevent majorities from falling victim to erroneous ideas and from adopting inappropriate policies which not only fail to realize the ends aimed at but result in disaster.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 July 2006