Several years ago, I signed up for an introductory economics course at a private California university. On the first day of instruction, the professor began his lecture with, more or less, the following round of gibberish:<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, class, we begin our lesson in economics. \u2018What is economics?\u2019 you say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, the first thing you must remember about economics, is that it primarily involves natural resources.<\/p>\n
\u201cResources are finite things \u2014 things like land, labor and capital, which happen to be the factors of production. But we\u2019ll get into that later.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor now, the first thing you need to know about natural resources, is that they are scarce. Scarcity \u2014 or, more precisely, the scarcity of natural resources \u2014 is basically the first lesson of economics. The second, of course, is its proper allocation and distribution, in the most fair and efficient manner possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people will tell you about the free market, free enterprise system. They call it \u2018laissez faire\u2019, and they will claim that it is fair; that it is fair to leave the allocation of these precious and scarce natural resources totally unregulated, in the hands of the greedy.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow let me ask you students something. All of you registered for this class. You each had to make an appointment and line up to sign up for this class. (This was back in 1991, before automatic touch-tone telephone or Internet registration.)<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, what if there were no university regulation involved? What if the registrar told all of you to stand at one end of the football field and run to the other end to get your registration? Obviously, the fastest runners would get there first. What would happen to the cripples, to the slower ones? Is that how we want to allocate natural resources? Is that fair?\u201d<\/p>\n
After that first day of class, I walked right over to the registrar\u2019s office and dropped the class, \u201cMicroeconomics 101,\u201d which should have been subtitled, \u201cintroduction to Marxist economics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wealth is not gold but mind. Natural resources are meaningless without skill, ability, creativity, entreprenuership \u2014 and the free and open commercial environment that naturally promotes and sustains them. The Philippines, for example, has (or had) more natural resources than many of her much more prosperous Asian neighbors, yet still it remains \u201cThe sick man of Asia,\u201d immersed in avoidable poverty.<\/p>\n
Capitalism is not a zero sum game, with winners, the more able, ruthlessly exploiting the losers, the less able. Capitalism benefits all, though some obviously more than others. As Winston Churchill once remarked, \u201cThe inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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