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  Economic freedom

GDP

Social mobility (helping the poor become rich)

The Third World

Anti-Green

The modern right


In favour of capitalism

The basic problem of economics - How can we make our country prosperous? - was solved long ago, in the 18th century, by Adam Smith and other thinkers of the Enlightenment. Yet some people, all these years later, still don't believe it.

Economic freedom (capitalism, property rights), intellectual freedom (science and technology) and self-interest makes societies prosperous. Strong, utopian government leads to unemployment, poverty, emigration and famine. This has been repeatedly demonstrated in practice in countries all over the world. Yet ignorant thinkers continue to resist these ideas even today.



Money does buy happiness



The correlation between money and happiness.
From the Pew survey above.



Intentions v. Outcomes

If it is true that wealth is good, and poverty is bad, then who is actually ending poverty and creating wealth?

The fact is that the right is the friend of the poor. The left is the enemy of the poor:



Economic freedom



Map of world economic freedom 2005, from The Heritage Foundation. See full size.
Blue - Free.
Green - Mostly Free.
Yellow - Mostly Unfree.
Red - Repressed.
White - No data.




GDP

Perhaps the clearest finding in all of economics is the correlation between economic freedom and prosperity. Compare the table of economic freedom with the table of the richest countries.

Socialists claim to want to make people better off. They claim to want to reduce poverty, not increase it. And yet they refuse to approach the issue scientifically, namely by seeing what actually does reduce poverty, and adopting it.

If you want your country to be prosperous, the most logical thing to do is the following. Forget ideology. Forget your pre-conceptions. Simply look at the countries high on this list, and do what they do.




Social mobility (helping the poor become rich)

Social mobility is easier in America than anywhere else on the planet. Europe is dominated by class, accent and address. Most of the world is dominated by tribe, religion, caste, family, and political corruption. It's hard to escape your destiny in most of the world. But in America if you go to school, and work hard, you'll make money. It's not perfect, but it's better than anywhere else. If you care about people's material circumstances, as leftists since Marx claim to, then you ought to want every country in the world to be like America.

Leftists claim to care about the poor, and yet their policies don't seem to help the poor become not poor (which surely is the whole point).

The main problem is that leftists have no real understanding of what it's like in the poor uneducated underclass. Leftists understand middle-class liberal coffee-house culture, but little else.


The left don't understand the poor

Leftists understand middle-class liberal coffee-house culture, but little else.


What stops people getting out of the ghetto?

There have been studies that suggest social mobility has declined in the west recently (in the sense of the absolute numbers of people moving from poor up to middle class).


The homeless



The left don't understand the non-western world

The left don't understand what it is like among the western poor. Similarly, the left have no realistic idea of what it's like in undemocratic countries. They understand comfortable middle-class life in a free country, but little else.



The left don't understand criminals

The left don't understand criminals - for, essentially, the same reasons why they don't understand dictators:




The modern right (separate page)




The Third World (separate page)




The right and freedom (separate page)




"The great revolution of the twentieth century will turn out to be the liberal revolution - by 1970 it was already patently obvious that the socialist revolution had failed everywhere."
- Jean-Francois Revel.

"In the past five hundred years, perhaps in all history, there has only been one genuinely successful revolution - one that delivered on its promises for a better world, based on the principles of freedom, equality, enterprise and endeavour; one that actually succeeded, despite the acknowledged imperfection of some of its outcomes. ... It was the American Revolution of 1776. That's the only one that has ever really worked."
- Rob Foot, The New Anti-Semitism?



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