james200_Sean GladwellGetty Images_worldconnection Sean Gladwell/Getty Images

The Poverty of Anti-Capitalism

With more and more people lashing out against markets, globalization, and economic growth, it is worth pausing to consider the world we may be losing. Both current challenges and the past failures of economic planning suggest that we need more market pricing, more globalization, and more growth, not less.

PRINCETON – Our world has become both confusing and confused. The international economy works well, but the political economy is mired in hostility toward markets, frustration at globalization, and skepticism about growth. Each of these beliefs interacts with, and reinforces, the others. Even large segments of the global elite are wringing their hands over the perceived failures of markets, globalization, and growth.

It is easiest to see where the hostility toward markets came from. Markets depend on prices, but prices have become a source of anxiety and puzzlement for many people. Not only have prices risen, but many twenty-first-century marvels have no obvious price at all. Consumers are now accustomed to universal internet connectivity and freely available services like search engines. They can download or stream an infinite supply of entertainment, and they are saturated in news media – most of which they do not pay for (at least not in any traditional sense). In many countries, people also receive medical services apparently for free. Even America’s notoriously expensive health-care system handed out COVID-19 vaccinations and tests.

At the same time, expansive fiscal and monetary policies, along with supply-chain disruptions stemming from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have fueled inflation, making everyday existence (energy, food, housing) feel more expensive. We have a vision of the future in which everything is free, yet our current reality feels unaffordable and exploitative. With citizens demanding government intervention to moderate or reverse the price surges, politicians face enormous, irresistible pressure to respond.

https://prosyn.org/LOMzj5t