Monday, January 29, 2018

Rick Kelo on the 2 Ways to Organize Society

None of us is an island.  We all spend every waking moment of our lives as an individual, but also living in a society of individuals.  This is an unavoidable aspect of human existence.  So how should we best organize our interactions with one another?

Rick Kelo, a West Point graduate and outspoken liberal philosopher notes that there are ultimately only 2 ways to organize the economic activity of huge groups of people.  They're either:

  1. The voluntary way, named Capitalism
  2. The coercive way, named Socialism.

In the voluntary way, says Rick Kelo, consumers voluntarily choosing which entrepreneur most meets their needs.  The consumer decides which business owner will become rich and successful and which will fail. 

The only other way to organize society is by violence, coercion & force as the substitute of peaceful, voluntary cooperation.  For a government to seize private property and declare it their own as Venezuela did to their nation's oil or the USSR did to Russia's farms.
Rick Kelo

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Rick Kelo Considers Economic Mobility

Rick Kelo is concerened that most Americans are unaware, due to the problem-inventing / fear-mongering from politicians who need something to promise to fix in order to get votes, that economic mobility in our country is very high.

Rick Kelo
Someone born into the lower class, which in economics refers to the bottom quintile of income distribution, is more likely to reach a higher income quintile than they are to remain in the lower class they were born into, notes Richard Kelo.

Rick Kelo also noted that many of the persistent & gripping effects of inter-generational poverty stem from interventions against the market.  The governmental welfare apparatus has become literally a machine for producing poor people & keeping them poor due to the fact it is loaded what public choice economists call 'perverse incentives.'  The government monopoly on schools is just as bad.  Ask yourself this: when you go into a poor neighborhood you will see many fancy cars.  You will not see any fancy schools.

The difference?

Cars are provided by markets, schools by government.