Celebrating Capitalism: Travel: From Torture to Joy

One of the benefits of capitalism can be seen through the lens of the transformation of travel.

Writes Jeffrey Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books:

The nature of travel is one of the most changed by the advent of the capitalist economy. For most of the human history, travel was something to dread and even avoid at all cost.

Just look at the term itself. The word travel shares the same Middle English root as the word travail, which means to toil or labor. The word in Middle English was travailen, which meant something deeply unpleasant. Looking even further back in time, we find the Latin slang word travailler, which means… to torture!

Indeed, through human history, traveling has usually been torture. If you see a movie set in the Middle Ages in which one person is traveling on his own and is not being forced to do so, you can pretty much assume it is untrue. No one traveled alone. If you did, you would certainly be robbed, beaten, enslaved, or killed. You always traveled in groups, and these groups had to include people who could protect you. There was no other way. Most people stayed put.

What about modern times? Everything has changed. As usual, we take it for granted.

Michael Graham Richard did some interesting research on travel times in the United States, based on the 1932Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States. What he found is quite revealing. It took people an entire day just to get out of New York. Going from New York to Georgia or Ohio took two weeks. If you wanted to get to Louisiana or Illinois, you had to set aside a full five weeks! That’s just to get from here to there.

But thanks to railways, all this changed half a century later. What used to take two weeks in 1800 took only a day or two by 1857. If you set aside a week, you could get to Texas — the travel time sliced to about 20% of what it was 50 years earlier. In a month, you could get to California, which was rather amazing by historical standards. Also, you wouldn’t typically be beaten, robbed, or killed, which was pretty great.

By 1932, modernity had arrived. You could go coast to coast in four days!

Of course, now you can do all of this in a few hours, thanks to planes and cars. And driving itself became more fun than ever. It’s one of the great changes in the history of the world: Travel went from torture to joy. And it happened because of technological advances working through a market system that serves people in their daily needs. Getting from here to there is one of the strongest needs that we humans have. It is what gets us all the things we rely on for the good life.

Quote of the Day: Every Act of Entrepreneurship is Revolutionary

Every act of entrepreneurship is revolutionary and rooted in the anarchist spirit. It strikes at the heart of the status quo. It dares to be dissatisfied with what is. It imagines something new and better. It brings about unexpected, unapproved, and progressive change by adding a new dimension of experience to how we understand ourselves and how we interact with others.

Without entrepreneurship, history would lack forward motion, our understanding of the uniqueness of our time in this world would be forever undefined, and society itself would atrophy and finally die. With it, every attempt to control and freeze the world faces opposition and long-run failure.

History teaches that those who dare stand in the way of human progress will eventually be run over. Yes, there is plenty of friction and too many victims as we get from here to there. But we will get there, one creative act of disobedience at a time.

This is from the highly articulate publisher and editor Jeffrey A. Tucker of the Laissez Faire Books on the forces of decentralization founded on entrepreneurship.

Quote of the Day: Every Tax Reform is a Push for Higher Taxes

Every tax reform in my lifetime has actually been a push for higher taxes in one form or another. And there are still other ways to raise taxes besides raising taxes, reducing deductions, capping deductions, and closing loopholes. You can raise tariffs, increase user fees, enact quotas, inflate the money supply, or outright confiscate people’s property through police state tactics. All these methods suck resources from the private economy into the government.

The goal of every tax reform is to do this in the sneakiest way possible.

The media are no help in clarifying language. When a politician proposes a cut in taxes, the reporter imagines that he or she is a clever and hard-hitting journalist by shooting back: “How are you go to pay for that?” Nonsense. If the thief decides not to take your wallet, he shouldn’t be asked how he is going to pay for his failure to steal.

Of course, all of this is beside the point, really. The core problem is spending. If the government didn’t spend money, it wouldn’t need to tax anyone. The only real way to lower taxes over the long run is to cut spending, but again, this is not going to happen. Even those who talk about spending cuts are really talking about cutting the rate of increase in spending over five or 10 years in budget projections that have never panned out even one time in the history of the universe.

This is from Jeffrey Tucker publisher and executive editor at the Laissez Faire Books.

Let me add another 'sneaky' or furtive way to impose taxes has been to use pseudo-righteousness or moral uprightness as cover for government spending (e.g. Sin Taxes) 

And another thing, politicians often mistake treating tax revenues as a constant function of tax rates, i.e. increasing tax rates equals increase in tax revenues. They forget that people respond to incentives, such that higher tax rates may drive economic activities underground. This means political goals will not be met because of the unintended consequences from ignoring human action and pretentious wisdom.

Quote of the Day: Change is the Core for Great Civilization

Wait!

It’s NOT the kind of pernicious “CHANGE” peddled or promoted by politicians and their political zombie followers seen in media or in mainstream institutions where (emotionally packaged) ‘change’ for them means that people need to think more collectively and become conformists which implies the surrender civil and individual freedoms to become tacit ‘serfs’ in ‘service for society’ (society here is a euphemism for political overlords).

Instead, the changes which makes society prosper is when people are allowed to think and act DYNAMICALLY—where danger, failure and losses are seen as virtues rather than a curse, as these represent crucial elements for discovery, learning and importantly creative destruction, all of which adds to the betterment of civilization.

Jeffrey Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books in magnificently expounds on these…

The impulse to create environments that are hyper-cushioned and protected does not prepare anyone for effective functioning in real life. That’s because this type of environment has nothing to do with the real world. No matter how much we regulate, manage, create safety nets and otherwise build systems that remove obvious dangers from the word, the structure of the universe guarantees that the future is always unknown. Uncertainty does exist and cannot be eradicated. Change happens, and we have to be prepared to adapt to it. Nothing that happened in the past can necessarily be repeated in a changed future.

This is especially true in the economic environment. In a growing and developing economy, there is no stasis. Nothing is the exactly the same one day to the next day. There are constant changes in prices, resource availabilities, consumer tastes, worker availability and, especially, in technology. If a system cannot accommodate these, it is useless.

In a growing economy, there are profits and losses, success stories and bankruptcies, amazing triumphs and terrible losses and, most of all, there are surprises around every corner. Every day is an opportunity for something newer and better.

The government talks of stabilization, but there is no stability in a developing economy. Change, change and more change is the central character. Institutions rise and then must be torn down and replaced by new institutions.

This is the core of what builds a great civilization. It is not safety and stability but open-endedness, the opportunity for discovery and reinvention — that is the driving force of social and economic development. This also happens to be the very thing that bureaucracies and regulations oppose. They shut opportunity and constrain innovation. They tend to want to preserve what is outmoded and put fetters on what is emerging.

But here is the irony: If we think of history as the competition between controlled safety under despotic rulers and open-ended uncertainty under freedom, societies that embrace freedom win out every time. Freedom leads to growth and long-run triumph.

The above should apply not only to commerce but to all aspects including regulations as well.

Read the rest here

Quote of the Day: Wherever there is Liberty, there is Commerce

Another gem from Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books

there is more to the task of liberty than hating and decrying the state. The other side of the coin is developing a genuine love of liberty, which implies a love of its most spectacular, people-serving feature: commerce.

Commerce keeps the world orderly and rational and free. It gives us drive and ratifies our efforts. It sparks imagination and defines its boundaries. It feeds the world, sustains and builds civilization, and unleashes the best in the human spirit. It keeps us materially connected and linked to our brothers and sisters across the globe. It makes possible, in our own time, beautiful worlds we could never dream up on our own.

Wherever there is liberty, there is commerce. And this commerce breaks down the barriers that the state erects between people. Commerce ignores borders, draws people together whom the state would like to see separated. It always tends toward the service of human needs rather than civic priorities.

Without some liberty, however restricted it might be, and the commerce it sustains society would die in a matter of weeks. The state alone sustains nothing.

Jeffrey Tucker on the 5 Pillars of Economic Freedom

I previously posted the 10 principles of classical liberalism.

The outspoken Jeffrey Tucker of the Laissez Faire Books reduces them into 5 (emphasis original)

Here are five core elements to this idea of market freedom, or whatever you want to call it. It is my short summary of the classical liberal vision of the free society and its functioning, which isn’t just about economics but the whole of life itself.

Volition. Markets are about human choice at every level of society. These choices extend to every sector and every individual. You can choose your work. No one can force you. At the same time, you can’t force yourself on any employer. No one can force you to buy anything, either, but neither can you force someone to sell to you.

This right of choice recognizes the infinite diversity within the human family (whereas state policy has to assume people are interchangeable units). Some people feel a calling to live lives of prayer and contemplation in a community of religious believers. Others have a talent for managing high-risk hedge funds. Others favor the arts or accounting, or any profession or calling that you can imagine. Whatever it is, you can do it, provided it is pursued peacefully.

You are the chooser, but in your relations with others, “agreement” is the watchword. This implies maximum freedom for everyone in society. It also implies a maximum role for what are called “civil liberties.” It means freedom of speech, freedom to consume, freedom to buy and sell, freedom to advertise and so on. No one set of choices is legally privileged over others.

Ownership. In a world of infinite abundance, there would be no need for ownership. But so long as we live in the material world, there will be potential conflicts over scarce resources. These conflicts can be resolved through fighting over things or through the recognition of property rights. If we prefer peace over war, volition over violence, productivity over poverty, all scarce resources — without exception — need private owners.

Everyone can use his or her property in any way that is peaceful. There are no accumulation mandates or limits on accumulation. Society cannot declare anyone too rich, nor prohibit voluntary aestheticism by declaring anyone too poor. At no point can anyone take what is yours without your permission. You can reassign ownership rights to heirs after you die.

Socialism is not really an option in the material world. There can be no collective ownership of anything materially scarce. One or another faction will assert control in the name of society. Inevitably, the faction will be the most-powerful society — that is, the state. This is why all attempts to create socialism in scarce goods or services devolve into totalitarian systems.

Cooperation. Volition and ownership grant the right to anyone to live in a state of pure autarky. On the other hand, that won’t get you very far. You will be poor, and your life will be short. People need people to obtain a better life. We trade to our mutual betterment. We cooperate in work. We develop every form of association with each other: commercial, familial and religious. The lives of each of us are improved by our capacity to cooperate in some form with other people.

In a society based on volition, ownership and cooperation, networks of human association develop across time and space to create the complexities of the social and economic order. No one is the master of anyone else. If we want to succeed in life, we come to value serving each other in the best way we can. Businesses serve consumers. Managers serve employees just as employees serve businesses.

A free society is a society of extended friendship. It is a society of service and benevolence.

Learning. No one is born into this world knowing much of anything. We learn from our parents and teachers, but more importantly, we learn from the infinite bits of information that come to us every instant of the day all throughout our lives. We observe success and failure in others, and we are free to accept or reject these lessons as we see fit. In a free society, we are free to emulate others, accumulate and apply wisdom, read and absorb ideas and extract information from any source and adapt it to our own uses.

All of the information we come across in our lives, provided it is obtained noncoercively, is a free good, not subject to the limits of scarcity because it is infinitely copyable. You can own it and I can own it and everyone can own it without limit.

Here we find the “socialist” side of the capitalist system. The recipes for success and failure are everywhere and available to use for the taking. This is why the very notion of “intellectual property” is inimical to freedom: It always implies coercing people and thereby violating the principles of volition, authentic ownership and cooperation.

Competition. When people think of capitalism, competition is perhaps that first idea that comes to mind. But the idea is widely misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that there must be several suppliers of every good or service, or that there must be a set number of producers of anything. It means only that there should be no legal (coercive) limits on the ways in which we are permitted to serve each other. And there really are infinite numbers of ways in which this can take place.

In sports, competition has a goal: to win. Competition has a goal in the market economy, too: service to the consumer through ever increasing degrees of excellence. This excellence can come from providing better and cheaper products or services or providing new innovations that meet people’s needs better than existing products or services. It doesn’t mean “killing” the competition; it means striving to do a better job than anyone else.

Every competitive act is a risk, a leap into an unknown future. Whether the judgment was right or wrong is ratified by the system of profit and loss, signals that serve as objective measures of whether resources are being used wisely or not. These signals are derived from prices that are established freely on the market — which is to say that they reflect prior agreements among choosing individuals.

Unlike sports, there is no end point to the competition. It is a process that never ends. There is no final winner; there is an ongoing rotation of excellence among the players. And anyone can join the game, provided they go about it peacefully.

Summary. There we have it: volition, ownership, cooperation, learning and competition. That’s capitalism as I understand it, as described in the classical liberal tradition improved by the Austrian social theorists of the 20th century. It is not a system so much as a social setting for all times and places that favor human flourishing.

The way to peace and prosperity is only through economic freedom.

Quote of the Day: Corruption is a Regular Effect of Interventionism

You can read thousands of academic papers on the problem of “corruption” in countries around the world and completely miss the central point. The way to eliminate the corruption is to eliminate the barriers to enterprise. Why is this not obvious? Because many people imagine a utopian ideal that does not now and never has existed: good government. They imagine that government rules can be enforced impartially based on science or the public good.

It’s sheer nonsense. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action in 1966:

“Unfortunately, the office-holders and their staffs are not angelic. They learn very soon that their decisions mean for the businessmen either considerable losses or — sometimes — considerable gains. Certainly, there are also bureaucrats who do not take bribes, but there are others who are anxious to take advantage of any ‘safe’ opportunity of ‘sharing’ with those whom their decisions favor… Corruption is a regular effect of interventionism.”

(bold emphasis added)

That’s from Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books.

Quote of the Day: Freedom is the Essence of Humanity

Oh they tell us that in a democratic system, we can vote and that this is our choice. We have nothing to complain about. If we don’t like the system, we can change it. But this is wholly illusory. The government completely owns the democratic system and administers it to generate the types of results that government wants. More and more people are catching on to this, which is why voter participation falls further in every election season.

The great thinkers of the libertarian tradition have always told us that freedom and the good life are absolutely inseparable. I think of Thomas Jefferson, Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Albert Jay Nock, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek and so many others. Even contemporary authors have addressed the theme. They had long warned that every step away from freedom would mean a diminution of the quality of life. We are seeing these prophecies come true.

Too often public policy debates take place on the wrong level. The core point is not to make the “system” work better or otherwise fine-tune the rules within a bureaucracy. We need to start talking about larger issues about the dignity of the human person, the moral status of freedom and the rights and liberties of the individual in society. The expansion of the state is not just wrong as a matter of “public policy”; it is wrong because it is dangerous to the good life and the quality of life.

To kill freedom is to kill the essence of what makes us human.

(bold emphasis mine)

The stirring excerpt is from the prolific Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books.

Again, the mainstream’s public policy debates can be summarized into the following alternatives 1) change the authority involved 2) throw money at the problem 3) control, restrain or prohibit activities of parties perceived as immoral and or 4) tax the alleged offenders.

And that’s why politics tend to become mostly personality oriented as policy debates have been premised on a system which is largely perceived as a “given”, and where the solution has been reduced to “saintliness” or “virtuosity” of those in power. The solution of which is like eternally Waiting for Godot who never comes.

Instead what truly matters is to debate the ethics, as well as, the feasibility from which the incumbent political system has been established. [Well anyway maybe economic realities would render the debate moot]

Unfortunately, all of which of mainstream’s way of solving social problems evolve around restricting people’s freedom.

Yet ironically and fortunately, many people find ways to circumvent or fight the repressive system—built to benefit and preserve the interests of the political insiders which thrive on patron-client relations or state (crony) capitalism—through the informal economy, black markets and corruption (as response to arbitrary regulations or statutes).

Bottom line: The battle for freedom continues.

Quote of the Day: Government Driven Inequality

The regulatory and tax states have made the lower classes into pariahs from the point of view of the commercial world. They are expensive to hire and hard to fire, which makes them even more expensive to hire. The minimum wage is bad enough, but that is only the beginning. A giant machinery governs how, where, when, and under what terms they can work and enjoy fulfilling lives. Business creation is harder than ever for anyone but the highly educated elite.

When they do get jobs, the whole system is allied against their social advancement. Cash business is criminalized. Everything requires a permit. The bureaucracy rules, instead of the entrepreneur. The laws, taxes, mandates, programs — and everything else the state has done — work like a giant bed of sharp rocks in the middle of a river that punishes those who tried to get to the other side.

Inflation and the Fed’s interest-rate policy have punished the accumulation of wealth and shortened the time horizon of the lower third of the population classes. The rise of the police state and the criminalization of their lifestyle have driven them into a culturally, socially, and legally marginal existence, so that they are always one step away from entanglement with police, courts, and jail.

As government grows — and the regulatory and tax states expand — and as the prohibitions on behaviors, services, and goods grow and grow, society becomes ever less economically mobile and dynamic. The class system that is part of every society becomes a caste system of entrenched position. It becomes a society of the put-upons versus the privileged.

That’s an excellent excerpt from a book review by Jeffrey Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books.

Every choice represents a tradeoff. Growth of government equates to reduced growth for the private sector. And where choices are politicized, the end result is wealth inequality prompted for by asymmetric political exposures—political inequality. So wealth becomes concentrated to the political class and their cronies at the expense of everyone else. Yet media and the academe have been blind to these developments.

Quote of the Day: How the Information Age has been Enriching People’s Lives

This is a rather long but substantially insightful excerpt from Jeffrey A. Tucker of Laissez Faire books on the unquantifiable benefits of the information age. [bold emphasis mine]

The most difficult-to-quantity aspect of digital media has been its contribution to the sharing of ideas and communication throughout the world. This has permitted sharing and learning as never before, and this might be the single most productive activity in which a person can participate. The acquisition of information is the precondition for all investing, entrepreneurship, rational consumption, division of labor and trade.

Step back and consider what a revolution this truly is. From the beginning of history until the 19th century, information could travel only as fast as we could run, walk or sail. There were also smoke signals, carrier pigeons, putting notes in bottles, waving lanterns in windows and the like. Finally, in the 1830s -- extremely late in a vast and grueling history in which humanity languished in poverty and sickness without knowledge broader than the immediate surroundings -- we saw the beginnings of modern communication with the glorious invention of the telegraph.

Here we had, for the first time, the emergence of geographically noncontiguous communication. People could find out more about what was going on in the world beyond their immediate vicinity, and that has had amazing implications for everyone engaged in the grand project of uplifting humanity. What could people then share? Cures, technologies, resource availability, experiences and information of all sorts.

This is also the period when we saw the first signs of the modern world as we know it, with a rising global population, extended lives, lower infant mortality and the creation and rapid increase of the middle class. Communication is what signaled people about new possibilities. From there, we saw huge advances in metallurgy, medicine, sanitation and industry. Then followed expansions of income; the division of labor; transportation via railroads; and, eventually, more of the thing that really matters: ever-better ways to share information and learn from others through telephones, radios and televisions.

But then 1995 represented the gigantic turning point in history. This was the year when the Web browser became widely available and the Internet opened for commercial purposes. It's remarkable to think that this was only 17 years ago. Unimaginable progress has taken place since then, with whole worlds being created by the day, all through the wondrous, spontaneous order of global human interaction in an atmosphere of relative laissez-faire. This was the beginning of what is called the digital age, the period of global enlightenment in which we find ourselves today.

And what gave it to us? What made it possible? This much we know for sure: The government did not make this possible. The forces of the marketplace caused it to come into being. It was the creation of human hands through the forces of cooperation, competition and emulation.

This alone refutes the common lie that the free market is all about private gain, the enrichment of the few. All these technologies and changes have liberated billions of people around the world. We are all being showered with blessings every hour of the day. Yes, some people have gotten rich -- and good for them! -- but all the private gain in the world pales in comparison with what digital commerce has done for the common good.

Yes, of course, we take it all for granted. In one sense, it has all happened too fast for us to truly come to terms with this new world. There is also this strange penchant human beings have for absorbing and processing the new and wonderful and then asking just as quickly, "What's next?"

No amount of empirical work can possibly encapsulate the contribution of the Internet to our lives today. No supercomputer could add it all up, account for every benefit, every increase in efficiency, every new thing learned that has been turned to a force for good. Still, people will try. You will know about their claims thanks only to the glorious technology that has finally achieved that hope for which humankind has struggled mightily since the dawn of time.

In short, the information age has been democratizing and fueling the knowledge revolution—a revolution that is bound to empower entrepreneurs and would topple 20th century vertically top-down structured (public and private) organizations and institutions.

Quote of the Day: Real Money

From Jeffrey A. Tucker (Daily Reckoning)

The new coins we use in transactions are not real. They are wearing a mask, a disguise, one put on by the state. More absurdly, the state tells us not to look at the reality, but rather to trust God that all is right with the money in the realm.

The old coins, in contrast, are precisely what they say they are and, therefore, have nothing to hide. There are no invocations that require a leap of faith. The truth is found on the scale and is told in ounces.

The gold ones are, of course, the ones you really want to hold. Their value reflects the metal content. Melt them, restamp them, make them into jewelry and they are still worth no less than the market value of the metal.

And who decides what the values of these old coins are? The coins might bear the likeness of a politician. They might bear the name of the nation-state. But these pictures and slogans are merely interlopers on the real point. What you hold is valuable not because some legislature, Treasury Department or central bank says it is valuable. Its worth was and is dictated by the market, which is to say, the choices and values of human beings. No government can add to or take away this value except by physically manipulating the coin itself.

Not only that. If you dig deep enough in the coin shop, you might run across coins that were not minted by governments at all, but by private manufacturers. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, this was the way coins were made in Britain. Not by the Royal Mint, but by entrepreneurs no different from any other.

Video: John Stossel Interviews Jeffrey Tucker "Society Can Manage Itself"

In this interview by John Stossel, Mises Institute editor and author Jeffrey Tucker shows how government intervention impedes on our choices, which affects even the routinary things we do, that ultimately impacts the quality of our lives.

(Hat tip: Professor Robert Murphy)