"People have pretty much always bought and sold in markets, but they have not always embraced markets as dignified or even nonobscene social spaces in which anything but mutual swindling and plunder takes place. They have not always embraced the commercial and technological heresies we call innovations that raised the average rate of per-capita income growth in places like the modern United States from roughly 0% per year to the positively insane rate of roughly 2% per year that we Americans have enjoyed since the early nineteenth century.
This mind-blowing fact–increases in real standards of living from the bottom to the top of the income distribution, year after year, with the benefits accruing disproportionately to the poor and the descendants of the poor, with no end in sight–did not happen for the usual reasons people point to. It wasn’t natural resources. The value of your copy of Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich doesn’t come from the trees farmed to make the paper or the oil that was refined into the fuel used to ship it. Institutions like secure property rights are necessary in the same way oxygen is necessary for a fire, but they aren’t sufficient. Slavery, imperialism, and colonialism are popular (and resurgent) explanations from the left, but “We are saying, to be precise, that war, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism were on the whole economically stupid” (p. 118).
It happened because we embraced the liberal idea of profit-tested dissent (with modification) from old ways of producing and exchanging and doing–what Adam Thierer has called Permissionless Innovation. We didn’t execute Bill Gates when Microsoft released Windows 95 or throw Steve Jobs off a cliff when he rolled out the iPad in 2010. Jobs didn’t have to get permission from puzzled members of the commentariat who wondered “What is it for?” or Luddites who worried that it would destroy the publishing industry when he was explaining what this thing that wasn’t a smartphone or a laptop but maybe kind of something in between could do."
https://www.aier.org/article/leave-me-alone-and-ill-make-you-rich-who-made-our-book-possible/
This mind-blowing fact–increases in real standards of living from the bottom to the top of the income distribution, year after year, with the benefits accruing disproportionately to the poor and the descendants of the poor, with no end in sight–did not happen for the usual reasons people point to. It wasn’t natural resources. The value of your copy of Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich doesn’t come from the trees farmed to make the paper or the oil that was refined into the fuel used to ship it. Institutions like secure property rights are necessary in the same way oxygen is necessary for a fire, but they aren’t sufficient. Slavery, imperialism, and colonialism are popular (and resurgent) explanations from the left, but “We are saying, to be precise, that war, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism were on the whole economically stupid” (p. 118).
It happened because we embraced the liberal idea of profit-tested dissent (with modification) from old ways of producing and exchanging and doing–what Adam Thierer has called Permissionless Innovation. We didn’t execute Bill Gates when Microsoft released Windows 95 or throw Steve Jobs off a cliff when he rolled out the iPad in 2010. Jobs didn’t have to get permission from puzzled members of the commentariat who wondered “What is it for?” or Luddites who worried that it would destroy the publishing industry when he was explaining what this thing that wasn’t a smartphone or a laptop but maybe kind of something in between could do."
https://www.aier.org/article/leave-me-alone-and-ill-make-you-rich-who-made-our-book-possible/