Why We Will Not Have Prosperity

The problem with prosperity is it cannot be perceived in advance.  As mentioned earlier, the root of the word is Latin for "hope."  We think of prosperity as the house, the car, then bank account, stock portfolio, the club, the vacation when in fact it is prospective:  open opportunity for what is good.

The hope-root of the word is a theological virtue, this captures the sense of that:

1818 The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.

It is all prospective: aspirations, inspirations, expectations, happiness.  Bastiat did a modern turn on this in 1850:

I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.

As Bastiat demonstrates in a series of examples, we cannot see what good would occur in freedom.  And freedom is like that.  Unimagined good comes from it.  A recent example of this was the deregulation of telephones by Hero-President Jimmy Carter.  There was no foreseeing the economic advancement of computers tied to phones and cell phones getting dirt cheap when he made The Move.  No one saw it coming.  But the temporary pain opened up to much good for many.  (I recall telephone company employees calling in talk radio descrying deregulation and the inconvenience to their careers.)  No Jimmy Carter, no Steve Jobs, no Amazon.com, no email, no internet.

The choices we have right now are -

X. Murder Afghanis for their natural resources so 20 year employees can have 40 year vacations

or

Y. Deregulate medicine.

94% of those who vote pick X.  In a democracy, the 94% is actually a minority, but as Thoreau lamented

the war to be “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.” 

Thoreau was talking about the Mexican war, where Southern farmers stole territory from Mexico to plant cotton crops that had depleted US farmlands.  And General Grant said the US Civil War was Divine Retribution on the South for their war on Mexico.

The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war.  Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.  We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.

Indeed, we can read headlines and see actions, which assure those who depend on plan X.  "We Bomb Yemen (Vacation Continues Unabated)" The vote is rigged to keep plan X the course that is elected, but that is no excuse, since we all enjoy what paltry returns we get from plan X.

Lack of imagination, lack of hope, leads to plan X.  Democracy thrives on lack of imagination, for it allows the few to look and around and decide what to steal.  That does not take much imagination. We did it in 1846, and by 1860 we were paying the price.  So let's see... 2002 plus 14 is 2016.  So whoever the next president is, expect real war.  We never learned our lesson.

If we only deregulated medicine, we could avoid war.  We'd have prosperity.

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