Here is a 5-minute video from PragerU on the best-kept secret of the Western world, which is the dramatic drop in world-wide poverty rates that has occurred over the last half-century. Generally speaking, if you want to know the doubling-rate in the wealth of any nation, just take the average rate of national economic growth and divide it into the number 72. So, if a country grows at an average rate of 2% annually, say, its wealth will double in 36 years.
https://www.prageru.com/videos/rich-get-richer-poor-get-richer
The message is that “all boats go up in a rising tide.” Okay, maybe not every single boat. Some just have too many holes, and they sink. And in a decent society, we don’t let them sink. But generally speaking, the rise in wealth in the free – and free-enterprise – countries of the world over the last half-century, is simply astonishing. But why is this such a well-kept secret?
One of the reasons this will continue as a public secret is that the world-wide leftist/socialist movement doesn’t want to advertise this world-altering truth. Why not? Perhaps because if it gets out, the left will have less to complain about, to envy, and to smash. Marx must be turning in his grave. Never mind the obvious historical truth that his “philosophy” (scare quotes, are because it was not really a philosophy at all) underpinned the worst human slaughters in all of human history. Marx floated his theory of “immiseration” – the flabby idea that the working classes of the world would be driven into poverty by capitalists. Instead, when Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Evil Empire, visited America in 1959, he was picketed everywhere – not by upper class capitalists, but by … American workers, who said “Nyet” to Communism. They knew that under Communism workers, farmers, and so on, were under the boot-heel of the State and its so-called 5-Year Plans, and they were poor and hungry most of the time. Khrushchev went back home with his tail between his legs.
I have always complained that everyone uses the word “capitalism” as if only greedy free-marketeers use capital to exploit others.
But all nations employ “capital.” The difference is that in a free-enterprise system choices on the use of capital are made by private individuals and private corporations, whereas is an unfree, socialist or communist country, capital is first plundered from the people who earn it, and then employed by the State for the public ends of the State, whether the people approve of those ends or not.
So we should scrap the term “capitalist society” and instead use the term “Free enterprise society.”
