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| Five Myths About the Free Enterprise System |
| 2012-08-12 |
| The biggest lie: 1. Free enterprise hurts the poor. The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and plenty of politicians would have us believe that the free-market system is a contest between the ultra-rich and everyone else (the “99 percent”). But in fact, there never has been a greater force for helping the poor than free enterprise. Since 1970, the percentage of the world’s population living on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day has fallen by more than 80 percent. Hundreds of millions of people have been pulled out of grinding deprivation. This miracle was not the result of U.N. development projects or U.S. foreign aid. It was free trade, rule of law, property rights and entrepreneurship that achieved this miracle. In China alone, free trade and foreign investment lifted 400 million Chinese out of absolute poverty between 1981 and 2001. Whatever the Occupy movement claims, every American earning more than $34,000 a year is in the world’s top 1 percent, as World Bank economist Branko Milanovic calculates in his book “The Haves and the Have-Nots.” Americans make up less than 5 percent of the planet’s population, but we’re about half the members of the world’s 1 percent. And we’ve accomplished that through our commitment to free enterprise. Surprising to me is that this is on the WaPo web page. Published July 13th, so it was probably buried on page 97. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #3 Maybe in the 50's or something .... I'd go with prior to Herbert Hoover's Administration. Markets were still relatively free in the very early 20th Century but not for long thereafter. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2012-08-12 22:02 |
| #2 Nice article. But we don't have a free enterprise system. Maybe in the 50's or something, but not since I've been in the workforce. It's a race to the bottom now, and Americans aren't one to settle for the Silver. |
| Posted by: bigjim-CA 2012-08-12 20:21 |
| #1 Obama and fellow travelers have gotten rich by taking money from the poor as well as everyone else via government fiat and giving it to themselves. They keep perpetrating the myths about free enterprise. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2012-08-12 15:27 |