Thursday, November 30, 2017

QUORA: ‘Why do you support individual liberty over national prosperity?’

Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3] Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.


I left this answer:

Let’s rephrase the question: “Why do you support healthy trees over a thriving forest?” It’s self-contradictory. A forest without healthy trees is doomed.

Likewise, a nation is made up of individual human beings. You can’t have national prosperity without prosperous, productive individual human beings. You can’t have prosperous, productive human beings without individual freedom based on individual rights, which includes the right to property and freedom of trade. Just as the health of a forest is the sum of the health of its trees, national prosperity is the sum of the prosperity of its individual inhabitants. “National prosperity,” like a “thriving forest,” is an abstraction. Nations don’t prosper. Only individuals prosper, because only individual human beings, like individual trees, exist.

Related Reading:

The Capitalist Manifesto—Andrew Bernstein



1 comment:

Mike Kevitt said...

If the U.S. became a free country again, and the rest of the world stayed the same, economic activity here would be many times more than the whole rest of the world combined. But, it would be better if the whole rest of the world became free, too.