Thursday, December 17, 2009

For Civilization, It Is Mises or Bust: Featured on Mises.org

My article "For Civilization, it is Mises or Bust (originally posted here) is featured today on the Ludwig von Mises Institute web site (Article | Comments) | Spanish Translation (Thank you, Euribe!)

I hope you will enjoy reading it. Here is an excerpt

Before the rise of liberalism made continuous capital accumulation possible across generations, the common man held a gross underestimation of what his own species was capable of. He took it for granted that economic stagnation across millennia was simply an inevitable fact of life. He had no inkling that human society was capable of enormous strides in the standard of living within a single decade. If the average man had any notion of it at all, he would have shrugged at the fact that his own standard of living was not much different from that of the average man a dozen generations before him, or, for that matter, from an even more ancient forebear 1,000 years prior. And if the ruling caste lived high on the hog while the bulk of the populace remained mired in squalor, well that was just a fact of life, too.

But that has irreversibly changed. The phenomenal increases in the well-being of man over the past centuries have exploded such lies. The common man knows he and his fellows are capable of wondrous achievements.

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