If you could change one event in the course of human history (or lets say in the last 300 years) with the goal in mind of trying to maximize the amount of (economic) freedom in the world in 2010, what would it be and why?
Try to be specific, not just well I would eliminate the US government. It would have to have been something like I would have prevented country X from entering war Y or I would have put clause blank into the Constitution, or prevented law Z from being passed, or changing the result of a battle or a war.
Convinced a young Otto von Bismarck to take up a quiet life in the countryside. That eliminates modern Germany, the prototypical welfare-eduational system in Imperial Germany, both World Wars (and their resulting consequences, like the US income tax, Wilsonianism, the Federal Reserve, the New Deal, FDR’s confiscation of gold, the WWII-era wartime controls that led to the modern British system, the debasement of monarchy, the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, the Cold War..) and probably set back the proto-EU ideology that started with folk like Napoleon for a good long while.
How about aclause that explicitly prevents any regulations that inhibit business activity as well as any “welfare” programs by all levels of government? This would have cut the size of the US government significantly throughout history.
Convince a young Karl Marx to take up chess instead of philosophy/economics. (Although, I’d imagine there would be someone just like him who would take the fallacies of Adam Smith to their logical conclusions sooner or later.)
That’s the thing: society actually needs to build up the resistance against viral abuse. Until you do, that stuff will come along at some point.
That’s also why information technology is so important: so that we can learn ideas from other places and don’t have to discover everything ourselves through pain and suffering.
If you could change one event in the course of human history (or lets say in the last 300 years) with the goal in mind of trying to maximize the amount of (economic) freedom in the world in 2010, what would it be and why?
I was listening to Rothbard talk about how leading up to the civil war, the south wanted to secede but there were also some states who wanted to secede from both the north and the south. Make it happen!
Is this a hypothetical sci-fi type question? If so, I’d make sure Marx reads Principles of Economics. I’d make a debate happen between Keynes and Hayek on national television.
This is actually a hard topic for me. It’s like when I hear leftist say “I wish Ayn Rand was never born” because they feel that without her maybe people wouldn’t get into her ideas and then they wouldn’t have to refute them, etc. Same would go for a libertarian saying that we shouldn’t read Marx. Well, why?
I wouldn’t want to actually change certain events. You learn from all events, whether it be the Civil War, the New Deal, or WWII. What I would want to change is how people interpret those events. History is always repeating itself, and a lot of people might ask why, but they aren’t researching the why itself. Only thing you can change is the peoples interpretations of those events.
I would change us joining the United Nations, though.
Marx lived in France at the same time as Bastiat; if only they would have met. Also, I’m not sure Hayek could win in a debate against Keynes (even Bertrand Russell was afraid to argue with Keynes; his rhetoric was that good).
No American democratic revolution, no French democratic revolution, no American Civil War, no world Democratist movement, no World War 1, no Soviet Union, no World War 2, no Communist China, no Korean War, no Vietnam War; no worldwide American Empire spreading their democratic socialist taint across the globe.
“No American democratic revolution, no French democratic revolution, no American Civil War, no world Democratist movement, no World War 1, no Soviet Union, no World War 2, no Communist China, no Korean War, no Vietnam War; no worldwide American Empire spreading their democratic socialist taint across the globe.”
That’s some world-class speculation right there. And if that T-Rex didn’t step on that butterfly… Hitler would have never been born.
Britain maintaining the US as a colony would have some major consequences of its own. Namely, they would enact their mercantalist policies with the US on the big losing end of the deal.
Move Carl Menger back in time as far as the question allows. Imagine what a different world this would be if the Austrians were the ones to refute mercantilism, instead of Adam Smith. Imagine if the work of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard equivalents was synonymous with “economics.”
