Part 6 - The Invisible Hand Is a Gentle Hand

Published October 13, 2011 in Talking Points by Sharon Harris

This is part six in a multi-part series. Be sure to read parts one, two, three, four, and five.

Abundance

A free society is one of abundance.

A place where people can work themselves out of poverty — instead of their poverty becoming a way of life that will be passed down to succeeding generations.

Let's look at Social Security. You get a little of your money back. When you die, it disappears. In a free market, you would have the opportunity to retire better off than you are while you're working. Even if you're a minimum wage-earner.

Economist and author Robert Genetski did the math. In his book, he showed how privatizing Social Security and government schools, along with a reduction in government regulations, would add at least $5,000 annually to the income of even the lowest-paid workers. What does that mean? Using conservative assumptions, virtually everyone could retire with $1 million or more!

The name of his book is, appropriately, A Nation of Millionaires.

Imagine a country that was literally a nation of millionaires. In one generation, people could leap-frog from a modest income to a level at which they could leave their children small fortunes. Knowing that it's possible, we shouldn't demand any less.
We can't even imagine all the wonders that will exist when human minds are set free to create — when we get government out of the way of progress.

Because big government doesn't work, but freedom does.

Someone once observed, if government had been in charge of fighting the polio epidemic — instead of the Polio Foundation — today we would have bigger, better iron lungs.

The gentle invisible hand vs. the visible fist of government.

A free society is a tolerant society. In part seven, read how the free-market encourages tolerance while the government creates one-size-fits all 'solutions.'