How can that be?
It’s because of free enterprise in a society that values and protects God-given rights. I wrote a couple weeks about the falling price of light as one of many examples of how free enterprise is the most most effective antipoverty tool known to man.
I wrote:
A by-product of entrepreneurs striving to find new and better ways of doing things, because they can profit from the innovations, is a society where:
- the poor can now have and enjoy the kind of things
- that used to be things only the rich could afford
Economist Donald Boudreaux argues here that we now have daily access to riches that famous millionaire John D. Rockefeller never even could have had. He sums it up:
This fact means that, by 1916 standards, I am today more than a billionaire. It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller in 1916. And if, as I think is true, my preferences here are not unusual, then nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago.
