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America: A Free Economy, a Prosperous Nation
Fox News ^ | July 04, 2002 | Radley Balko

Posted on 07/05/2002 5:05:20 PM PDT by wooden nickel

Edited on 04/22/2004 12:34:05 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]

A couple of years ago, the late economist and eternal optimist Julian Simon co-authored a book, It

(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: juliansimon; stevemoore

1 posted on 07/05/2002 5:05:20 PM PDT by wooden nickel
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To: wooden nickel
Everything is relative. When I was a kid, a man could support a family with his wife staying home and raising the kids. Right or wrong, that is no longer the norm in the USA.
So is this still the best country in the world? Sure - but compared to what? Slave labor in China? Euro-socialism?

2 posted on 07/05/2002 5:18:06 PM PDT by Sabatier
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To: wooden nickel
America: fat, dumb, and happy, and losing more of their freedoms every day.

Tuor

Give me liberty or give me death.

3 posted on 07/05/2002 5:22:35 PM PDT by Tuor
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To: madfly; Ernest_at_the_Beach
fyi
4 posted on 07/05/2002 5:30:59 PM PDT by Libertarianize the GOP
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To: Sabatier
Julian Simon's argument is that as the world's population increases, prosperity also increases because more brains are available to work the problem. And the increase in prosperity is greatest in nations that are economically free for the same reason. In Socialisms and dictatorships, only the elites are allowed access to the problem which is why they stagnate.

Each fall the Heritage Foundation publishes their list of the world's nations in order of most free to least free. On their list, there is no free nation that is not prosperous and no unfree nation that is not poor. Has nothing to do with resources or mean annual rainfall.
5 posted on 07/05/2002 6:25:11 PM PDT by edger
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To: wooden nickel
Great article. Thanks for posting it.

6 posted on 07/05/2002 7:33:26 PM PDT by grundle
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To: grundle; Libertarianize the GOP; Tuor; Sabatier; wooden nickel
The poor in America today in many ways live better than royalty did just a century ago
. . . who in turn presumably lived better than the slaveholders of the antebellum South. That puts a whole different light on it, doesn't it?
In fact, by most standards, poor Americans today live better than average Americans did just 50 years ago.
. . . and some of us remember that as being O.K. . . .

The larger point is that journalism's short deadlines systematically filter out the small day-to-day improvements which accumulated to such remarkable economic progress over the course of the 20th century.

Journalism's bias is hiding in plain sight:

journalism is superficial because of its short deadlines, and--as illustrated above, (only) partly for that reason--journalism is negative towards the institutions and people upon which we-the-people depend.
That is sufficient, in-and-of itself, to explain why journalists are as anticonservative as Ann Coulter (Slander) says.

7 posted on 07/06/2002 6:16:13 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
bttt
8 posted on 07/06/2002 3:42:12 PM PDT by Libertarianize the GOP
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