If you are concerned about Obamacare. If you are concerned about the future of our nation. If you want a book, that if everyone in the United States read it, would gurarantee the resolution of our economic problems, then you need to read Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem, by Jay Richards.
Richard's book is tonic for the discouraged economic soul. Delightfully well written, entertaining, and easy to follow, Richards argues for the power of unfettered capitalism. In his conclusion the author writes, "If I've conveyed anything in the previous pages, I hope it's the oft-neglected truth that the creation of wealth has as much to do with spirit as with matter" (pg 209).
Richards makes this point in many hard hitting ways. For example, our problem is not diminishing natural resources, it is fettered mental and spiritual resources. Our problem is not the rich getting so at the expense of the poor. It never works that way. The problem is an underclass in American culture denied the tools or desires to get ahead by an overweening governmental bureaucracy.
Wealth is not material. True wealth is a byproduct of spiritutal, moral, and social liberation. That best of this liberation takes place when men and women amplify personal wealth by meeting the legitimate needs of others.
By contrast, socialism is the enemy of wealth, freedom, and prosperity. It doesn't liberate the poor. It oppresses them. By stealing from the rich and giving to the poor Socialism inevitably kills the Goose that lays the golden egg. It is not a win-win proposition. It is not even a win-lose proposition. Ultimately, it is a lose-lose proposition.
Richards organizes his book around eight myths about capitalism. My favorites are the myth that free trade requires a winner and a loser, the myth that the essence of capitalism is greed (Greed actually destroys capitalism), and the myth that working with money is inherently immoral.
Richards closes with an insightful observation about the Environmental Movement. "In a recent documentary, Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore said that by the mid-1980s, environmentalists had succeeeded in their primary goals. So the activists got more extreme. Then, with the end of the Cold War, many left-wing activists joined the environmental movement without changing their philosophy. Environmentalism then became, as Moore put it, the "new guise for anit-capitalism'" (pg 196).
Buy this book, read it, and get all of your liberal friends to read it. Economic freedom and political freedom cannot be separated. They are joined at the hip.Labels: Book Reviews, Economics