SUPERB – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:51 A.M. ET: Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess champion and political activist, has written a superb column, based on a previous Facebook comment of his, countering the views of Bernie Sanders. This is a must read, filled with information. An example becomes our quote of the day. From Garry Kasparov, in The Daily Beast:
The problem is with the proposed solutions. A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them. Of course Senator Sanders does not want to turn America into a totalitarian state like the one I grew up in. But it’s a valuable example of the inevitable failure of a state-run economy and distribution system. (Check in on Venezuela for a more recent example.) Once you give power to the government it is nearly impossible to get it back, and it will be used in ways you cannot expect.
The USSR collapsed because it couldn’t compete over time, despite its massive resources and devout ideology. The Soviets put a man in space before America but couldn’t keep up the pace against an innovating, free-market competitor. My Facebook post went around the world on technology created in America. The networks, the satellites, the software, nearly every ingredient in every mobile device and desktop computer, was invented in the USA. It is not a coincidence that the most capitalist country in the world created all these things. Innovation requires freedom of thought, freedom of capital, and people who believe in changing the world.
Yes, the free market can be cruel and it is by definition unequal. It has winners and losers. It also sparks the spirit of creativity that humanity desperately needs to flourish in our ever-increasing billions. Failure is an essential part of innovation and the free market. Of every 10 new companies, perhaps nine will fail in brutal Darwinian competition. A centrally-planned economy cannot imitate this engine of creative destruction because you cannot plan for failure. You cannot predestine which two college dropouts in a garage will produce the next Apple.
COMMENT: Be sure to read the whole thing and send it around. To me, the most dangerous candidate running in this election is Bernie Sanders. He's a decent and honorable man, and, as Kasparov points out elsewhere in his piece, he feels passionately for his cause. Good on him. But his cause is wrong, and dangerous. Bernie Sanders and I were students at the University of Chicago at the same time. I never met him. I wish I had. I would have preached the gospel of freedom to him, and he could have avoided all his bad thoughts.
March 10, 2016 |