PROSPERITY IS AN INTENTIONAL RESULT

Prosperity:  The three questions that really matter

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/jerrybowyer/2013/05/17/prosperity-the-three-questions-that-really-matter-n1599108/page/full/

Townhall Finance – Jerry Bowyer – 5/17/2013

Please click the link above for the entire article – it’s a fascinating read.

And in this big picture, only three questions really matter to long-term national prosperity. Here’s the first:

How many people are there?

This is the demographic question, people matter more than anything else, because people create wealth. Other than air and sunshine, everything else in our environment needs to be transformed by us in order to become a resource. At the very least, the apple must be picked to become food; in order to get even a halfway decent apple a great deal of work is needed.

But the moment we transform it, it is no longer nature, it is artifact. Oil was a pollutant oozing in the streets of Cleveland, its stinking mass shoveled and carted away by workmen until a chemist told John D. Rockefeller that it could be turned into a valuable commodity. People do that sort of thing. And people manage to create huge sums of wealth even if they live on a rock sitting in the ocean in tiny prosperous city states like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan with very little by way of natural resources, because they have something better: they have people, the unnatural resource.

WHAT’S INSIDE OF THEM?

People are complex clusterings of motivations centering in on a person. At the core is what is commonly called the heart, I mean the heart of the self.

·      What do you believe about God, man and the world?

·      Do you believe you should live entirely for today’s pleasures or defer gratification in the interest of future prosperity?

·      Is virtue the true measure of mankind, or simply an arbitrary set of rules invented to keep us down?

Religion is a hugely important factor in national growth and prosperity and if you have any interest in understanding which nations will and won’t prosper, you’d be better off not allowing personal views or political correctness speech code sensibilities to screen it out as a factor.

WHAT’S OUTSIDE OF THEM?

In truth, there is a lot of overlap between question two and question three. After all, societies are the result of human interaction . . .

·      Do you get to keep what make?

·      Will government confiscate your property, or tax away the proceeds of the sale of your labor?

·     ·      Do you have to pay an additional tax in order to get fair government services in the form of a bribe or coerced campaign contribution?

·      When you devise business plans can you count on at least some price stability or are future budgets, already murky enough, made more fallible due to fluctuations in the value of currency?

·      Will those currency and interest rate manipulations create boom and bust cycles and how do you know whether the booms are real or bubbles?

·      How do you plan for a world in which legal institutions create more flux rather than more stability?

·      Will there be a change in regime?

·      Can I build for the long term when the institutions are built on a foundation of sand?

I’m convinced that in order to screen out the noise you need a filter which helps you distinguish between what is important and what’s a shiny, backlit distraction.

WHAT’S IMPORTANT IS PEOPLE; THE WAY THEY THINK AND ACT; AND THE WAY THEIR SOCIETY TREATS THEM.

How could things possibly be otherwise?

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