It's a Jetsons World - Private miracles and public crimes

Jeffrey Tucker

The Ludwig von Mises Institute

2011

289 páginas

9h 38m

ISBN-13: 9781610161947

There is a revolution afoot, one that is happening much more quickly than the Industrial Revolution. We are living in the middle of it, and yet there is a strange lack of consciousness about it. To the extent that we are conscious of it, we complain about it. We complain that there is too much food available and this tempts us to get fat. We complain about the digitization of society. We watch movies about the hidden evils of the grocery stores and wonder if the fruit was somehow sprayed with evil chemicals that are going to give us autism or cancer or something. The market economy is delivering miracles by the minute, and yet we hardly notice or care; worse, we denounce the realization of this dream of all of history, this coming of heaven on earth, and call it decadent and dangerous.

This is a tragedy, in my own view. We should be conscious of the cause-and-effect relationships operating in the world of human action that give rise to the globally extended order we call the market economy, an order fueled by human choices, entrepreneurship, and relentless learning and copying — and kept together by pricing signals, private property, and the freedom to trade. These institutions are what are bestowing miracles on us every day, the Jetsons world that amazes me every day.