The Downside of Prosperity - Too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

I’ve always been a fan of the prosperity created by Western civilization in general and the United States in particular. Indeed, I even created a website called Gratitude for America, where I write about American entrepreneurs who invented things like barbed wire and standardized shipping containers. But maybe there’s a downside to this prosperity because we’ve created a class of people (especially in government) completely disconnected from how the world actually works.

Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, is the most important entrepreneur in human history. He basically untethered mankind from farming, one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. In 1831, when he invented the mechanical reaper, approximately 80% of the American population was involved in agriculture, and, in most places in the world, it was higher—in some cases, 95%.

Back then, farming’s efficiency hadn’t changed much since the time of the pyramids. A man, using a scythe, could harvest approximately one acre of grain a day. Fifty years later, McCormick guaranteed that, by using his machine, a farmer could harvest 15 acres a day. With today’s machines, a farmer can harvest up to 100 acres in a day. Small wonder that only 3% of the US population today farms.

The reason McCormick is so important is not because of farming, per se, but because he freed up most of the population to go out and do other, less dangerous things. With that shift, work-life expectancies began to skyrocket in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1800, the average life expectancy was approximately 30 years, with Europe averaging 33 and the US close behind. By 1900, the world average had increased to 32, but in Europe it had jumped to 43 and in the US to 47.

Since they didn’t have to be on farms, people became inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators. During the late 19th century, countless inventions (e.g., usable electricity, automobiles, and the telegraph) and innovations (e.g., drilling for oil, railroad expansion, and the widespread adoption of the assembly line) changed the Western world. Food became more abundant, transportation became easier and safer, housing became cheaper, and medicine began to improve.

In the 20th century, things really took off. Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, world life expectancy is 72 years, while in the US, it’s 78, and in Western Europe, it’s above 80.

Not only are we living longer, but we’re also prosperous beyond anything in human history. Our food is more varied, dependable, and plentiful than ever. We have transportation, hospitalization, housing, employment, clothing, education, sanitation, entertainment, and leisure opportunities exponentially beyond anything in all of human history.

Contrast all of that with what humanity endured through most of our history. Poverty and scarcity were the norm. Food availability was always an issue. War was almost constant. Work was dangerous. Slavery was everywhere. Many worked seven days a week, changing clothes was rare if at all, people rarely bathed, virtually everyone was illiterate, plumbing didn’t exist, disease was rampant, shelter was overcrowded, heating in the winter was from burning wood or dung if either could be found, infant mortality was stratospheric, and leisure was a luxury only the elites could afford.

The average Westerner’s life is far superior to any experienced by 99.999% of the people who ever lived, but, somehow, everyone today is a victim—and we know that everyone is a victim because the elites tell us so. Through schools, media, and government, we’re told that Western culture is racist, sexist, fascist, or somehow otherwise oppressive. Basically, the better things get, the worse they get.

America today reminds me of a Jetsons episode I saw as a child. George Jetson, the father of the “Space-aged family,” came home one day exhausted from working at Spacely Sprockets and said, “Jane, these one-hour-a-week workweeks are brutal.” No doubt we’d be told he’s still a victim.

The reason those elites, the ones who seek to manipulate the public, get away with it is because a significant portion of the population believes them. And they believe them because of the division of labor-driven prosperity that McCormick unleashed.

Virtually the entire left in this country has zero connection with anything having to do with creating anything, growing anything, building anything, or risking anything. They spend their days pushing paper in offices or selling cappuccinos, if they work at all. Not only are few of them farmers, but few are truckers, lumberjacks, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, or entrepreneurs. Few have ever had to balance paying a credit card bill versus making payroll. Few ever risked their money and invested sweat equity to start a business.

The left today is largely government employees, students, college-educated white women working inside large corporations, Wall Street, academia, the cabal of NGOs, the media, the 40 million who suckle on the government teat through programs like SNAP, and the 47% of the country who either pay no tax or get “refundable tax credits”.

Few of those people do anything remotely productive for the economy. Few understand that the government doesn’t have money beyond what it takes from taxpayers or prints via taxpayer IOUs. They have no appreciation for Capitalism, the thing that gave us our prosperity. They flush the toilets and expect them to work, flip the light switch and expect the room to illuminate, and go to the store to pick up a pound of beef without knowing how it gets there. Few of them have any real connection to the basic functionality of life.

The result of this societal bifurcation is that half of our population has little understanding of or vested interest in the country’s or the economy’s continued functioning. More regulations and higher taxes are always the answer because none of them are affected. Regulations make it harder to open a business or keep one running, but they’re easy promises for politicians to offer as the solution to every problem because their voters never pay the price for the consequences.

We’re living in the world Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. Everything we see going on in our cities, on our streets, and on our border is so because the division of labor has allowed so many people to bask in prosperity without having a clue about how it’s actually created or what’s necessary to maintain it. Their checks come, their jobs are secure, and they don’t have to deal with the government’s suffocating regulations, so everything is good.

Of course, it’s not good, and things are getting worse. Thomas Jefferson understood the problem, saying in 1824: “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” That is 2024 incarnate.

This needs to be fixed. How we do that, I’m not quite sure, but, at a minimum, we need to slash government spending and regulations at every level. Perhaps only those who pay taxes should vote. Perhaps government employees should not be allowed to vote. Maybe we make election day the day after Tax Day. Whatever the solution, until those voting have some vested interest in a well-run government and a functioning economy, things will only get worse, and they’re already pretty bad.  

 

Prosperity's Bible & Einstein's Definition of Insanity

Albert Einstein defined Insanity thus: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

One has to wonder what Einstein would think of the left’s continued desire to inflict centralized planning on the citizens of the United States. Central planning has been a failure virtually every time it’s ever been implemented, whether in the Soviet Union, Venezuela or here. And we’ve seen a lot of it here, and, not surprisingly, a lot of failures. Education, check. Mortgages, check. Welfare, check. Amtrak, check. We are already seeing the wheels coming off of their most recent foray into state control, Obamacare.

Despite everything we’ve seen, despite the track record of abysmal failure, liberals seem to think that centralization can solve everything. As disheartening as liberalism’s failures are in the social and education spheres, the real tragedy is what they have done in the economic sphere. It’s economic prosperity that gives liberals sufficient benefits that they have the luxury to chase their fantasy of a world filled with lollipops and fairness. And they are killing the golden goose.

The thing that liberals don’t get is that prosperity doesn’t come from some grand master plan. Rather, prosperity is the result of people taking risks, people working hard, and yes, people seeking to win. American prosperity is the result of billions of decisions made by millions of individuals over the course of two centuries. Decisions to risk everything to start a business. Decisions to start again after one or five or ten failures. Decisions to ignore conventional wisdom and take the road less traveled. Decisions to put a road where one didn’t previously exist. Decisions to invent things that seemed impossible. American history is replete with millions of stories of courage, perseverance, industriousness and optimism. Many of those stories you and I will never hear about or know about, but that doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from them. We do, because those entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors are the oxygen that keep the American economy from collapsing in the face of the left’s burdensome regulatory state. The problem is, as the regulations increase fewer and fewer people have the strength to withstand the onslaught of paperwork and fees and the intimidation by a burgeoning regulatory apparatus.

It might be worthwhile for liberals to look at how we got here in the first place.

Why did most of the inventors and entrepreneurs and innovators who created our prosperity take those risks? There are probably as many reasons as there are dreamers, but one thing is for certain, most of the people who helped build the most prosperous nation in the history were driven by a desire to improve their lot in life. Most of them didn’t come from a life of privilege. Most of them didn’t grow up in risk free bubbles where everything was provided to them by some government agency. Indeed most of them came from middle class households (or below) and wanted to create something better for themselves and their families. Not sure that’s true, check out this year’s Forbes 400 list. Of the 400 richest people in the United States, fully 68% of them made the list as a result of their own efforts, not because they were born in a golden bassinette or with a platinum spoon in their mouths.

A better source might be something call Prosperity’s Bible. That’s not the real title, but it’s appropriate. The actual title of the book is They Made America. From Robert Fulton, Samuel Colt and Cyrus McCormick to Juan Trippe, Ted Turner and Steve Jobs, it’s full of two centuries of the most important innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs in American history. These men – and a few women – built things, invented things, but most importantly, changed things. They helped drive a tiny nation of immigrants to become the most prosperous nation in human history. And they brought their fellow man along with them by creating jobs, opportunity and a dramatic improvement in the standard of living around the world. And in many cases, from Carnegie to Rockefeller to Gates, after they created it they gave much of their wealth away for the benefit of others.

But virtually none of these giants did what they did (except perhaps some of the railroad barons) at the behest of the government. Amadeo Giannini didn’t lend money on a handshake after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake because of any government mandates. Garrett Morgan didn’t invent the gas mask and the traffic signal in pursuit of government contracts. Chemist Leo Baekeland didn’t leave Belgium because there was no government support for his research – there was, plenty – no, he came to America to build a business… which he did, and one of the things he invented was plastic. Rockefeller didn’t rationalize the petroleum market to support some government regulation… although he did save the whales in the process.


And that’s the key to why liberalism has always failed, and always will fail.  It seeks to replace individual drive, individual achievement, and individual responsibility with government mandates, government support and most perniciously, government regulations… all enforced by nameless faceless bureaucrats who have no idea what it takes to succeed in the real world most of us live in.  Liberalism seeks to remove the risk of failure from the human condition.  It seeks an equality of outcome separate from an equality of effort. It seeks to restrict anything that might ever have a negative outcome.   It seeks to mold a world made of imperfect people into a perfect Stepford world where everyone is the same, no one has more than their share and everyone is told what they can’t do and what they must do by regulatory busybodies. 

Obamacare is just the latest in a half century long march of mandates, regulations and other aspects of centralization that have gutted American prosperity and in the process created tens of millions of wards of the state who have no desire to, nor understanding of how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go out and make something of themselves, create prosperity for their families and their country, to change the world by doing something of consequence.

Americans of all stripes could benefit from picking up a copy of They Made America. It shows in black and white exactly what it takes to create prosperity on an unprecedented scale. If liberals picked it up they might finally recognize that success can’t be mandated but it can be inspired and stop living up to Einstein’s definition of insanity.