Under the humming fluorescent lights of a Walmart Supercenter in rural Mississippi, I counted. One … two … three … four … five. Five aisles of food.
For animals.
Earlier that morning I’d been reading about the plight of Venezuela, where food, medicine, and even toilet paper, are in short supply. In their place, desperation and violence fuel a heart-wrenching humanitarian crisis.
Standing in a discount store in the poorest state in America, I was struck by this realization. The options available to our family dog greatly exceed those available to Venezuelan people.
While running for president, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., made news for questioning why Americans need access to a wide assortment of deodorant brands when there are hungry children in the world. He, and others who advocate for greater government control of our economy and our lives, would no doubt view my Walmart “eureka moment” as evidence of capitalism’s misplaced priorities.
Yet they’d be wrong for some of the same reasons they were wrong to support Hugo Chavez’s socialist dream for Venezuela, years before it became a macabre nightmare. Stores full of deodorant, or pet food, are not negative consequences of capitalism. Consumer choice is both a symptom and a driver of human flourishing.
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once said, “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” But the existence of wealth for one person, or nation, is not the cause of poverty for another. Empty store shelves are the result of command and control economics; they are not empty because other stores’ shelves are full.
Constrain and manipulate the economy politically, and what you get is corruption, cronyism, and poverty. It’s why a resource-rich country like Venezuela is as broken as it is.
No civilization has ever perfectly executed a system of political and economic thought, and none ever will, but there are clear hallmarks of prosperous societies. The rule of law is one: that laws should be clear, widely accepted, and equally applied. Protection of property rights is another: the idea that people should be secure in, and control the product of, their labor. A third is simply that people should be able to use their talents as they wish to create value for others through voluntary commerce.
For most of our history, the human story was one of abject poverty, turmoil, disease, and early death. At the turn of the 19th century, the confluence of the rule of law, defined property rights, and burgeoning voluntary commerce in early America created an unprecedented environment for growth.
In the 200 years since, progress has been made by orders of magnitude. Adjusted for inflation, per capita GDP has multiplied more than 28-fold, literacy rates have skyrocketed, and life expectancy has nearly doubled.
Technologies that could not be fathomed just a decade ago are now commonplace, from the poorest communities to the poshest. Diseases that were once death sentences can be treated with a pill. Hunger has largely been eradicated. Freer trade has brought billions of people out of poverty. For the first time ever, there are more middle-class and wealthy people in the world than there are poor.
It turns out that when people are liberated and empowered to earn success by helping others, they do just that. This freedom yields competition that leads to greater efficiency, specialization, and innovation, which in turn means new jobs, more growth, and expanded choice. The pie doesn’t have to be re-sliced. It gets bigger.
When confronted with the advancements of free enterprise, the economics deniers will inevitably highlight challenges experienced over the last two centuries. But evils like slavery, war, and even systemic income inequality all existed to a much greater degree before the advent of capitalism and were not the result of it. No, each stems from departures from the principles of economic freedom and from the inherent vices of human nature that would be present no matter the system. They are examples of what happens when people use force to exercise dominion over other people and their property.
Like generations before, current generations face unique challenges that threaten progress. As before, these challenges are not the result of free enterprise, but deviations from it.
A 2017 poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the economy is rigged against them. They are not wholly wrong. The American dream — the very idea that people can work hard to rise and succeed in pursuit of their passions — is being slowly extinguished under mountains of red tape and runaway debt that threatens future generations. Endemic corporate welfare rewards political influence over activity that actually improves lives, reinforcing a two-tiered society that pits people against each other. Because the rule of law is not fully upheld, people now confuse cronyism with free enterprise and rent-seeking with earned success. Public trust in key institutions is being destroyed.
These are serious, deeply ingrained problems. But the solution is simple. We need to remember why there are five aisles of pet food in a Walmart in Mississippi.
Russ Latino is vice president of the Economic Freedom Portfolio at Americans for Prosperity. He can be reached at [email protected].
