Responding to an excellent WSJ piece today, Don Boudreaux writes about the way the statist (government must provide for and take care of us!) mindset traps people in poverty. I would only add that the statist mindset can undo prosperity built up over generations. We are witnessing exactly that here.
Editor, The Wall Street Journal
1211 6th Ave.
New York, NY 10036
Dear Editor:
The tale told by Matthew Kaminski about Egypt is depressing ("Searching for
Hayek in Cairo," April 21). As long as most Egyptians fear free, competitive
markets and believe that their well-being is promoted by protected nationalized
monopolies - as long as "privatization and liberalization are dirty words" (as
Mr. Kaminski describes Egyptians' anti-bourgeois attitudes) - Egypt's economy
will stagnate and ordinary Egyptians will continue to be among the poorest
people on earth.
As the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey notes at the end of her book on
why the west grew rich, "in the long run the acceptance of creative destruction
relieved poverty. Wage regulations and protection and other progressive
legislation, contrary to their sweet (and self-gratifying) motives, have only
preserved poverty."*
McCloskey understands what Hayek understood: prosperity comes only to societies
that welcome entrepreneurial-driven economic change - only to societies steeped
in the realization that better tomorrows are impossible if everyone is protected
from every economic disappointment today. Societies that reject this reality
seal themselves in the awful amber of poverty.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity (University of Chicago Press, 2010),
p. 425.
