Whatever the merits or demerits of various political proposal, what must be kept in mind
when evaluating them is that the good fortunes and misfortunes of different sectors of the
economy may be closely related as cause and effect - and that preventing bad effects
may prevent good effects. It was not accidental that Smith Corona was losing millions of
dollars on its typewriters while Dell was making millions on its computers. It was not
accidental that Safeway surged to the top of the grocery business while A&P fell from its
peak to virtual oblivion.
The efficient allocation of scarce resources, which have alternative uses, means that some
must lose their ability to use those resources in order that others can gain the ability to
use them
Typewriters were no longer what the public wanted after they had the option to achieve
the same end result and more with computers.
Scarcity implies that resources must be taken from some places, in order to go to other
places.
Genuine plunder of one nation or people by another has been all too common throughout human history. During the era before the First World War, when Germany had colonies in Africa, only 4 of its 22 enterprises with cocoa plantations there paid dividends, as did only 8 of 58 rubber plantations and only 3 out of 49 diamond mining companies. At the height of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, the British invested more in the United States than in all of Asia and Africa put together. Quite simply, there was more wealth to be made from rich countries than from poor countries. For similar reasons, throughout most of the twentieth century the United States invested more in Canada than in Asia and Africa put together. Only the rise of prosperous Asian industrial nations in the latter part of the twentieth century attracted more American investors in that part of the world. Perhaps the strongest evidence against the economic significance of colonies in the modern world is tha
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