Capitalism And Freedom

Capitalism And Freedom helps you understand some of the most important factors protecting your liberty by outlining the government’s role in economics and how things go best when political entities are small and stay out of the flow of money in a country.

In school, we learn that economics and politics are separate. Actually, they almost always come hand in hand. Just imagine trying to mix the state-led ways of the Soviet Union with the freedom-centric government of the United States. It wouldn’t go over so well.

That’s because these two seemingly different pieces that comprise how our world works are actually interdependent. In other words, anything you do to one, good or bad, will affect the other.

Take a British person who wants to visit America after World War II. After planning his vacation he realizes that because of the way his government controls the economy means the pound is worth less than the dollar. He can’t afford to go anymore.

Or consider the situation fo an American that would like to visit the Soviet Union. They would have a hard time doing so because of the US’s pro-capitalist stance.

Both of these cases identify how socialist and communist viewpoints limit individual freedoms.

That’s why we need free-market capitalism. In this system, the government’s place is limited. Its primary purpose is to uphold the law and keep order rather than meddle with people’s freedoms. When this goes right, the market takes care of letting people have the freedom to buy, sell, and live as they please.

One thing that proponents of big government like to argue about capitalism is its riskiness. Crashes like the Great Depression and the recession of 2008 are examples. These people believe that politicians need to oversee the economy to make sure it doesn’t head for crisis when left to its own devices. But this kind of thinking comes from bad economics. Let’s examine the origins of these ideas to understand them better. After the Great Depression, economists started to propose that the feds spend more to correct market changes and keep things stable. This comes from a theory of a British economist named John Maynard Keynes. He believed that each time the government spends a dollar, it makes another dollar available for citizens to spend. But his thinking was flawed and this isn’t the way the real world works. These stimulus packages are inhibited by the lengthy process of getting anything through the governmental process. It just takes too long to implement them. By the time that they do become active, whatever crisis they were trying to avert is over. The people then have to pay taxes to cover something that’s only taking money…