Dear Friends,
It seems to me, while abandoning right principles is the ruination of a great nation, those very same principles provide a handy road map to prosperity, low crime rates, and a rising standard of living, for nations wishing to become so. Moreover, any nation adopting those universal right principles will have a positive effect on human history going forward. Everyone knows this truth in their hearts but the lure of power corrupts the elite and keeps them from it, while the lure of free money, keeps the people corrupt and prevents them from demanding it. So, instead of universal profit for everyone, people allow their greed, envy and lust bar them from it. Should a nation, even if old and set in it’s ways were to adopt these principles, it would see a turnaround in it’s fortune that would astound the world.
Wealth can be had for all, not by redistributing a dwindling amount, that is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but by creating access wealth. Society has the ability to create huge accesses of wealth easily. To create such prosperity however, does not require a government program, nor a large bureaucracy, but by empowering people to achieve their goals. Government’s role in creating societal wealth is to provide standards, not regulations. Any country could do it, few actually want to, and even fewer will. Here is a list and explanation of the right principles leading to a prosperous, free and vigorous nation.
Protecting the individual from the collective is of the utmost importance. Whenever the collective decides what is good for the individual, both the collective and the individual suffer. The individual because the collective never has morals or compassion, it is pure force. Moreover, the incentives in a system where the collective good supersedes the individual’s good, become pernicious. That is because instead of being motivated by self interest everyone is motivated by self preservation. The collective always has a ready reason to kill an individual for the collective good. Where the collective is king those who create wealth are stepped on, their inventions taken and they are personally attacked, because anytime someone rises above the rest in a collective, they become a threat. That way a society that values the collective over the individual must stagnate.
The free market system is the path to societal prosperity. Not welfare state capitalism, which is no more than a more palatable name for socialism, actual free market capitalism. Of course a free market is predicated on individual liberty and cannot function in a collective. A real free market however is the surest path to national prosperity there is, history shows this to be empirically true, while crony capitalism and socialism are the surest path to poverty and famine. During the era of actual free markets the economies of Europe and the US grew exponentially, not at the pathetic 2% we have come to expect since capitalism became crony and the rise of the welfare state. During the only time in the 20th century the US engaged in a real free market, under Calvin Coolidge, the economy soared to new heights of growth and prosperity, which led to a rocketing rise in the standard of living, low crime, less racism and huge access of national wealth. Until Herbert Hoover and FDR took the US down the path to cronyism and the welfare state.
In a real free market, one with standards, it is easy to get rich but hard to create monopoly. Building a monopoly requires at least some government intervention, to suppress competition by creating a barrier to entry, stifling innovation by regulations, having obscure tax codes or outright cronyism. Occasionally a monopoly can grow organically, where an innovation is too expensive or complex to implement, by the time the patent runs out, it is very hard to compete with it. If however, lacking government barriers to entry, the profit gets too high, other companies will compete for that high profit.
Limited government that creates standards not regulations is another principle that leads to prosperity for a nation. Imagine if a gallon was a regulation and not a standard? The volume of a gallon would depend on who was selling it, what liquid it contained, the shape of the container would be prescribed and the political favor of both the buyer and seller would be paramount. The regulations regarding the volume of a gallon would quickly run into perhaps hundreds of pages. In this way regulations create the conditions where monopoly can form, politically favored individuals can become extremely wealthy without providing any value and sand is thrown into the mechanism of the free market. Standards however facilitates the free market like oil an engine. Standards cannot be used by corrupt politicians to pass out money to their cronies, hinder the competition of unfavored businesses or enrich themselves at the cost to everyone else. Standards are a principle that leads to a prosperous nation while regulations lead to poverty and cronyism.
These fundamental, universal, right principles, wherever and whenever they are adopted, will inevitably lead to prosperity, a rising standard of living, less racism and low crime. All the goods people say they want. The elite will always argue against them however, because then the elite would have to provide value for their wealth, like you and I have to, and that is unacceptable to them. That is why the elite are in love with collectivism, cronyism and regulations. They intentionally confuse regulations with standards, they wrongly claim the collective is more important than the individual and they spuriously argue there needs to be monopoly to produce high value products, all to move us away from right principles and towards wrong principles. Those very few nations that do adopt right principles will be the movers of history in a positive way.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
