The "Economic Recovery" Continues: Businesses Are Being Destroyed Faster Than They Are Being Created

by Michael Snyder

What would you say about an economy where businesses are shutting down faster than they are opening?? Well, a shocking new study released by the Brookings Institution indicates that this is exactly what is happening in the United States.? We are absolutely killing small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit in this country, and as you will see below, the number of self-employed Americans has been on a downward trend for a decade even though our population has been steadily growing.? Traditionally, small businesses have been the primary engine of job growth in this nation, so the fact that study after study has found that small business creation is being crippled in the United States is a really bad sign for our economic future.

Personally, I write about our long-term economic decline nearly every day, but even I had no idea that businesses were being destroyed faster than they were being created.? According to the Brookings Institution, this first started happening?in 2009...

The American economy is less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last three decades. That's the conclusion of a new study out from the Brookings Institution, which looks at the rates of new business creation and destruction since 1978.

Not only that, but during the most recent three years of the study -- 2009, 2010 and 2011 -- businesses were collapsing faster than they were being formed, a first.

And this mirrors an earlier study conducted by economist Tim Kane.? According to his analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data, the following is how the decline in the number of new business jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration...

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

As you can see, this is a problem that has been building for decades and that has accelerated under the Obama administration.

We are strangling small business creation to death, and as a result the number of Americans that are self-employed just keeps going down.? Just check out this chart...

And keep in mind that throughout this entire time the U.S. population has been growing.? So the numbers in the chart above should be going up steadily as the population grows.? But instead they have just kept going down.

Meanwhile, the "economic recovery" is continuing in the corporate world as well.

On Tuesday, we learned that Office Depot is going to be closing 400 stores.

Why would that happen if the economy was actually getting better?

When this was announced, shares of Office Depot rose about 20 percent.

I can never understand why that happens.? You would think that when a business makes an announcement that essentially says "our business is failing" that it would cause people to dump the stock.

In any event, this comes on the heels of an announcement by Staples back in March that it was going to shut down 225 stores in the United States and Canada.

So where will we buy our pens and paper from now on?

If the economy really was "recovering", you would think that demand for office supplies would actually be on the rise.

But the only places where the economy is "recovering" is in places such as Washington D.C., New York City and San Francisco.

Those at the top of the pyramid are doing well, but almost everyone else in the country is really suffering right now.

When you kill off small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit, it tends to increasingly funnel money to the very top of the food chain.? And this is precisely what is happening in America at this point.? In a recent article, Charles Hugh Smith?included a chart that shows how average household net worth in the U.S. breaks down by quartile...

Bottom 25%: $4,600

From 25% to 50%: $21,700

From 50% to 75%: $78,900

From 75% to 90%: $242,800

Top 10%: $1,606,600

As you can see, the bottom 50 percent are really not that much above zero at all.? In the old days, it seemed like almost everyone was "middle class" in America, but now that is rapidly changing.

We can see this increasing divide in the real estate market as well.? According to?Bloomberg, sales of million dollar homes are booming, but sales of homes at the low end are plunging...

"Million-dollar homes in the U.S. are selling at double their historical average while middle-class property demand stumbles, showing that the housing recovery is mirroring America's wealth divide.

Purchases costing $1 million or more rose 7.8 percent in March from a year earlier, according to data released last week by the National Association of Realtors. Transactions for $250,000 or less, which represent almost two-thirds of the market, plunged 12 percent in the period"

So this explains why it is almost impossible to find an affordable home in San Francisco, but the overall homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years.

But even in our wealthy enclaves there are signs of deep economic trouble.? For example,?in New York City the number of homeless children has soared to a new all-time high...

They're just like other kids except they have a secret. They are homeless.? Children are living hidden lives in plain sight. They are part a growing number of low income families who find themselves with no way out but they are working hard to find a solution.

It's a big issue. And it's growing. More than 23,000 children sleep in homeless shelters every night, an all-time high, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

The only "recovery" being experienced in America is the one that is happening on Wall Street, in boardrooms in Silicon Valley and in the halls of power in Washington.

In the rest of the country, retail stores are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 20 percent of all families do not have a single member that is employed and?49 million Americans are dealing with food insecurity.

There is no way that we are ever going to have a broad-based economic recovery in this nation if we continue to destroy small businesses.? They are the lifeblood of any economy and they are the primary engine of job creation.

Sadly, our politicians seem completely clueless about all of this.? So they will continue to do the same things that they have always been doing and then wonder why the economy never seems to turn around.

View the original article here

U.S. War on Poverty Failed While Global Poverty Declined 80%: Economic Liberalization Begets Prosperity and Equality

By Mary Theroux

50 years after LBJ declared a ?War on Poverty,? the U.S. would do well to take a page from the global playbook--whereby economic liberalization and more open trade has resulted in an 80% decline in abject poverty since 1976.

The graphs below, taken from the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, ?Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,? surely ought to impress even the most avid central-planner:

To see how it happened, start with these graphs showing GDP (red) against the Poverty Rate (blue) for various regions over the past 40 years:

As the paper?s authors observe:

It is immediately visible that the series are almost perfect mirror images of each other: the poverty rate falls when per capita GDP rises and vice versa. ... In particular, we see no examples of poverty reduction without growth (or sustained rises with poverty accompanying growth) on a regional scale. [Emphasis added]

Thus, contrary to recent controversies around the issue, a rising tide does indeed raise all boats--regardless of region.

And for those decrying supposedly increasing inequality, the paper reveals very good news on this front as well--showing inequality declining in sync with poverty:

A look at China provides just one dramatic example. Since Nixon?s visit opening trade with China in 1972, and China?s subsequent ?Change, Reform, Open up? economic reforms beginning in 1978 and accelerating in the 1980s and ?90s, the Chinese economy has increased by 9.5% a year, resulting in vast improvements in both income levels and distribution:

While the paper?s authors did not include a survey of changes in economic policies across the regions covered by the study, any quick check against independent sources for such information makes its graphs just that much more exciting, with more and less dramatic improvements correlating with greater and lesser economic freedom.

It?s time for all who profess to care about the poor to join Bono in enlightenment. To all ?Progressives? in the U.S. bemoaning the U.S.?s flat poverty rate over the past 50 years, and ramping up to make 2014 the year of the fight against ?inequality?:

"Capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid."

And the economic growth that brings individuals out of dependency flattens inequality.

On this 50th anniversary of a failed domestic War on Poverty, let?s bring this global lesson home and hold up those responsible for prolonging economic stagnation in the U.S. and increasing the numbers dependent on government assistance as the true villains in the inequality play.

(function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Latest Economy
- Saxo Bank CEO Warns of Collapse Into "Totalitarian" Society
- Does a Minimum Wage Reduce Poverty?
- Too Big to Pop
- Is Colorado Pot Overtaxed and Over-Regulated Already?
- Beanie Baby Founder Facing Prison Because He Only Paid Some $1 Billion In Taxes, Should Have Paid $1.0055 Billion
- UK: Young people 'feel they have nothing to live for,' third have contemplated suicide
- 70% Of Americans Have "No Faith" In Government
- Marc Faber 'Congratulates' Ben: "Well Done, Mr. Bernanke!"

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy

View the original article here

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

by Michael Synder

What a year 2012 has been!? The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.? It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.? If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.? Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.? We need a fundamental change in direction.? Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.? We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.? Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.

The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.? Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.? Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.? So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.? They are a good summary of the problems that the U.S. economy is currently facing.

The following are 50 economic numbers from 2012 that are almost too crazy to believe...

#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps.? Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps.? That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that "things are getting better".

#2 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps.? Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.

#3 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming."

#4 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all Americans have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives.

#5 For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.? That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years.? Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

#7 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#8 The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been under 59 percent for 39 months in a row.

#9 In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed.? In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed.? It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place.

#10 When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job in America today, it comes to more than 100 million.

#11 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all small business owners in America "say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment."

#12 The number of jobs at new small businesses continues to decline.? According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration...

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

#13 The U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011.

#14 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.

#15 There are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.

#16 In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.

#17 According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were "middle income" back in 1971.? Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.

#18 The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.

#19 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

#20 Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty.

#21 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either "low income" or impoverished.

#22 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

#23 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.? Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#24 The average amount of time that an unemployed worker stays out of work in the United States is 40 weeks.

#25 If you can believe it, approximately one out of every four American workers makes 10 dollars an hour or less.

#26 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government.? Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.

#27 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.? And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare.? Overall, there are almost 80 different "means-tested welfare programs" that the federal government is currently running.

#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.

#29 Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans "not in the labor force" has increased by nearly 8.5 million.? Something seems really "off" about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans "not in the labor force" only rose by about 2.5 million.

#30 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

#31 According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.

#32 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.? That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#33 Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.

#34 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages.? According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married.? Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

#35 At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs.

#36 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance.? Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

#37 Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

#38 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#39 One survey of business executives has ranked California as the worst state in America to do business for 8 years in a row.

#40 In the city of Detroit today, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty, and close to 50 percent of all adults are functionally illiterate.

#41 It is being projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

#42 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.

#43 If you can believe it, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.

#44 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs.? 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

#45 Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was?$295.5 billion.? That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

#46 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#47 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

#48 The U.S. tax code is now more than 3.8 million words long.? If you took all of William Shakespeare's works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.

#49 According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.

#50 The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created.

#51 2012 was the third year in a row that the yield for corn has declined in the United States.

#52 Experts are telling us that global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.

#53 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.

#54 If you can believe it, one recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.

#55 Medical costs related to obesity in the United States are estimated to be approximately $147 billion a year.

#56 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high.? Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.

#57 Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.

#58 The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of all Americans combined.

#59 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.

#60 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#61 Nearly 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.

#62 In 2006, only 12 percent of all federal workers made $100,000 or more per year.? Now, approximately 22 percent of all federal workers do.

#63 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.

#64 Nearly 15,000 retired federal workers are collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually.? The list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.

#65 U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.

#66 Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.

#67 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.

#68 During fiscal year 2012, 62 percent of the federal budget was spent on entitlements.

#69 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.? Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#70 It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

#71 Medicare is also growing by leaps and bounds.? As I wrote about recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.

#72 Thanks to our foolish politicians (including Obama), Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.? That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.

#73 Amazingly, the U.S. national debt is now up to 16.3 trillion dollars.? When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.

#74 During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about as much debt as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.

#75 Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created back in 1913.

Please share this article with as many people as you can.? Time is running out, and we need to wake up as many people as possible.

View the original article here

Five Pillars of Economic Freedom

by Jeffrey Tucker

The great debate between capitalism and socialism suffers from a lack of clarity about definitions. This is why when Walter Block lectured in Brazil this past week, he was very careful to distinguish between crony capitalism and authentic capitalism. And it's why when I was interviewed, the question came up immediately: What precisely do you mean by capitalism?

Every day, for example, we read how the European economic mess is a "crisis of capitalism." Huh? It's been more than a century since governments let these economies grow on their own without bludgeoning them with regulations, taxing and looting the public, littering financial systems with fake money, cartelizing producers, shoveling welfare benefits, funding gigantic public works and the like.

Some advocates of market liberty believe that the term "capitalism" should be jettisoned permanently because it causes confusion. People might think that you favor using the state to back capital against labor, using public policy in a way that supports prominent producers over consumers or pushing political priorities that advance business over labor.

If a term elucidates an idea with accuracy, great. If it causes confusion, change it. Language is constantly evolving. No particular arrangement of letters embeds an immutable meaning. And what is at stake in this debate about market freedom (or capitalism or laissez-faire or the free market) is a substance of profound importance.

It's the substance, not the words, we should care about. Civilization really does hang in the balance.

Here are five core elements to this idea of market freedom, or whatever you want to call it. It is my short summary of the classical liberal vision of the free society and its functioning, which isn't just about economics but the whole of life itself.

Volition. Markets are about human choice at every level of society. These choices extend to every sector and every individual. You can choose your work. No one can force you. At the same time, you can't force yourself on any employer. No one can force you to buy anything, either, but neither can you force someone to sell to you.

This right of choice recognizes the infinite diversity within the human family (whereas state policy has to assume people are interchangeable units). Some people feel a calling to live lives of prayer and contemplation in a community of religious believers. Others have a talent for managing high-risk hedge funds. Others favor the arts or accounting, or any profession or calling that you can imagine. Whatever it is, you can do it, provided it is pursued peacefully.

You are the chooser, but in your relations with others, "agreement" is the watchword. This implies maximum freedom for everyone in society. It also implies a maximum role for what are called "civil liberties." It means freedom of speech, freedom to consume, freedom to buy and sell, freedom to advertise and so on. No one set of choices is legally privileged over others.

Ownership. In a world of infinite abundance, there would be no need for ownership. But so long as we live in the material world, there will be potential conflicts over scarce resources. These conflicts can be resolved through fighting over things or through the recognition of property rights. If we prefer peace over war, volition over violence, productivity over poverty, all scarce resources ? without exception ? need private owners.

Everyone can use his or her property in any way that is peaceful. There are no accumulation mandates or limits on accumulation. Society cannot declare anyone too rich, nor prohibit voluntary aestheticism by declaring anyone too poor. At no point can anyone take what is yours without your permission. You can reassign ownership rights to heirs after you die.

Socialism is not really an option in the material world. There can be no collective ownership of anything materially scarce. One or another faction will assert control in the name of society. Inevitably, the faction will be the most-powerful society ? that is, the state. This is why all attempts to create socialism in scarce goods or services devolve into totalitarian systems.

Cooperation. Volition and ownership grant the right to anyone to live in a state of pure autarky. On the other hand, that won't get you very far. You will be poor, and your life will be short. People need people to obtain a better life. We trade to our mutual betterment. We cooperate in work. We develop every form of association with each other: commercial, familial and religious. The lives of each of us are improved by our capacity to cooperate in some form with other people.

In a society based on volition, ownership and cooperation, networks of human association develop across time and space to create the complexities of the social and economic order. No one is the master of anyone else. If we want to succeed in life, we come to value serving each other in the best way we can. Businesses serve consumers. Managers serve employees just as employees serve businesses.

A free society is a society of extended friendship. It is a society of service and benevolence.

Learning. No one is born into this world knowing much of anything. We learn from our parents and teachers, but more importantly, we learn from the infinite bits of information that come to us every instant of the day all throughout our lives. We observe success and failure in others, and we are free to accept or reject these lessons as we see fit. In a free society, we are free to emulate others, accumulate and apply wisdom, read and absorb ideas and extract information from any source and adapt it to our own uses.

All of the information we come across in our lives, provided it is obtained noncoercively, is a free good, not subject to the limits of scarcity because it is infinitely copyable. You can own it and I can own it and everyone can own it without limit.

Here we find the "socialist" side of the capitalist system. The recipes for success and failure are everywhere and available to use for the taking. This is why the very notion of "intellectual property" is inimical to freedom: It always implies coercing people and thereby violating the principles of volition, authentic ownership and cooperation.

Competition. When people think of capitalism, competition is perhaps that first idea that comes to mind. But the idea is widely misunderstood. It doesn't mean that there must be several suppliers of every good or service, or that there must be a set number of producers of anything. It means only that there should be no legal (coercive) limits on the ways in which we are permitted to serve each other. And there really are infinite numbers of ways in which this can take place.

In sports, competition has a goal: to win. Competition has a goal in the market economy, too: service to the consumer through ever increasing degrees of excellence. This excellence can come from providing better and cheaper products or services or providing new innovations that meet people's needs better than existing products or services. It doesn't mean "killing" the competition; it means striving to do a better job than anyone else.

Every competitive act is a risk, a leap into an unknown future. Whether the judgment was right or wrong is ratified by the system of profit and loss, signals that serve as objective measures of whether resources are being used wisely or not. These signals are derived from prices that are established freely on the market ? which is to say that they reflect prior agreements among choosing individuals.

Unlike sports, there is no end point to the competition. It is a process that never ends. There is no final winner; there is an ongoing rotation of excellence among the players. And anyone can join the game, provided they go about it peacefully.

Summary. There we have it: volition, ownership, cooperation, learning and competition. That's capitalism as I understand it, as described in the classical liberal tradition improved by the Austrian social theorists of the 20th century. It is not a system so much as a social setting for all times and places that favor human flourishing.

It's not hard to discern my political outlook then: If it fits with these pillars, I'm for it; if it does not, I'm against it. Now, you tell me: Is the European crisis, or the U.S.' own, really a crisis of capitalism? On the contrary, an authentic capitalism is the answer to the biggest problems in the world today.

View the original article here