As good to re-read as it was to read the first time ...

Two hundred years ago the American people were quite a bit more equal in terms of wealth, and life was marked by unrelenting drudgery. Those relatively brutal living conditions weren’t an effect of socialism, even though socialism would have eventuated the same outcome.

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Cooperative exchange is the highest form of human interaction.

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The shame of socialism is that the wildly talented are restrained from profitably improving the lives of the people around them, and perhaps continents away. Thinking about life two hundred years ago, distance was a severely limiting factor for the talented when it came to making things better for everyone. No doubt there were people with skills similar to those of the richest Americans today, and some became very well-to-do by early 19th century standards. But they didn’t become staggeringly rich simply because a lack of technology limited the ability of the ‘1 percenters’ of the early 19th to touch the U.S. (and the world) with their genius. Limited technology has socialistic qualities in the outcome sense for it restraining the brilliant from improving the lives of others while getting rich for doing just that.

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2018/11/11/surging-wealth-inequality-is-a-happy-sign-that-life-is-becoming-much-more-convenient/?fbclid=IwAR3BbDsvASk_GAtBhFiiO3KtAxq5wHf8sSXies80B4IBUvXsc-McUme928I&sh=2657557064ca

The scarcity mentality leads folks to believe that if one person is rich, the wealth must come at the expense of another person. What the wealthy do in a capitalist economy is create more wealth - more stored human time and energy - through cooperative exchange.

"Fair Trade" Nudge Nudge Wink Wink Say No More

Question: Hey you libertarians, what's your beef with Fair Trade? It is voluntary!!

Answer: "They're right that Fair Trade is just another form of voluntary free trade and that the hostility some libertarians express toward the idea of paying more for coffee to help poor farmers is distasteful at times. However at the risk of being one of those smug contrarians Henley dislikes so much, I'm going to defend the libertarians on this one. Partially, anyway.

The simplest reason to object to Fair Trade coffee is that it's just a stupid name. It suggests that all other coffee is unfair and exploitative. As a sign at one coffee shop I visited put it, "Fair or Unfair? It's that simple." Well, it's not that simple. And if, as I do, you think the insights of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other economists are hard-won intellectual achievements, then a label that implicitly opposes those ideas is going to rub you the wrong way. This could have been avoided if we labeled Fair Trade as something like "Charity Coffee" instead, which would be more accurate and avoid disparaging any economic theories. But then it might not have caught on as well because buying it wouldn't let people signal their opposition to globalization, which brings us back to why so many libertarians dislike Fair Trade in the first place."
http://www.jacobgrier.com/blog/archives/3773.html

Dr. Boudreaux Hitting the Home Runs

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/boudreaux/s_654772.html

"The Prosperity Pool is filled small drop by small drop. Countless people line the edge of the pool, each dripping in a drop or two of additional "water" -- additional prosperity -- from time to time.

Just as a single drop of water doesn't noticeably increase the level of water in a swimming pool, very few single drops of prosperity have any noticeable effect on the prosperity level. Had in-flight Wi-Fi never been invented and supplied, few people would have noticed.

Ditto for almost everything else available on the market -- new shades of paint color; improved quality of stereo speakers; better techniques for freezing food; slightly longer-lasting light bulbs; a new fusion cuisine; a more-efficient machine for weaving cotton; improved corkage for wine; better batteries for laptop computers.

The list is practically endless.

Some drops are large, such as the polio vaccine, Henry Ford's innovation for producing automobiles and the microprocessor. But the great majority of drops are tiny. These tiny drops, though -- just like each of the many tiny drops of water in a swimming pool -- combine together to produce a wondrous effect. That effect, in the case of the Prosperity Pool, is an enormously high level of material affluence.

Unfortunately, many people want the prosperity level raised noticeably by a few gigantic infusions. Because each of us individually, even large corporations, are small compared to the whole, no one of us can ever realistically hope to raise the prosperity level noticeably. As a result, too many of us believe that we don't "change the world" by contributing little drops. Each of us individually wants to make a big splash -- to make a move that raises the prosperity level in a way that grabs lots of attention.

This desire, although understandable, reflects ignorance of the only proven process of generating genuine, widespread prosperity. That process involves unleashing creative entrepreneurship to search for profit by figuring out ways to better please consumers -- a process that results in huge numbers of small drops of prosperity being added to the Prosperity Pool."