Thomas Donlan had Thanksgiving in mind when crafting his latest Barron’s editorial commentary.
America is not merely the wealthiest country on earth; it is the wealthiest because it is the most productive. Intensive use of capital and equipment, a workforce that includes many skilled people, bountiful harvests, and abundant energy resources all are harnessed to our advantage, using the best managerial and financial tools and distributed by a system of mutually beneficial trading in free markets.
The market system drives products, services, and prices to their most efficient levels. Even though many Americans distrust them, markets bring goods and services to those who can use them.
Americans can obtain in trade with foreigners anything the U.S. economy lacks sufficient incentive to provide. The world is our oyster. Foreign trade also brings to our attention many of the things we do poorly, because foreign competition can set higher standards than we set for ourselves. Losing in trade alerts us to the possibility that we can do better.
America’s greatest economic mistakes have occurred in industries that we once dominated, such as shipbuilding, consumer electronics, automobile manufacturing, and steel-making. Hubris, the driver of Greek tragedies and credit-default swaps, has been a mixed and painful blessing, but we should give thanks when it bring us back to reality.
Among the blessings that our founders created for us is a federal system, which keeps our political mistakes smaller than they would be in a national government without practical limits on power.
We should give thanks that America has a diversified educational system, in which local communities provide tuition-free basic education to satisfy community standards, differently defined among tens of thousands of communities. It is imperfect everywhere and geographically unequal, but parents are free to move from town to town and county to county in search of better opportunities.