Nearly everyone complains about capitalism’s defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that government dirigisme — state direction or displacement of the market — cannot be a remedy because who do you think staffs the government and how do they get there? A big difference between the two systems — market and state — is that while the market diminishes social defects, the government magnifies them.
The Myth of European Plunder
Among a certain species of “critical” historian, it is an article of faith that Europe’s remarkable economic ascent was built not on its institutions, not on liberty, not on commerce, but on the systematic looting of the rest of the world. In this telling—descended...
