The Patriot Post® · Weekend Review: Progress Comes From Innovation

By: Jonah Goldberg

The standard left-wing complaint is to blame only big business and capitalism. But if you don’t think that exact sort of thing happens under socialist and communist systems, you don’t know anything about those systems.

Despite a century of anti-corporate rhetoric about the power of corporations, they actually come and go with amazing rapidity (Only 13 percent of firms on the Fortune 500 list in 1955 were there in 2011).

But government is forever. The state has the unique ability to protect existing “stakeholders” from the threats posed by innovation and competition, whether those stakeholders are businesses or unions, fat cats or philanthropies. That’s where the votes are and where the checks comes from.

But progress – material, medical, economic – comes from innovation. Economist Deirdre McCloskey notes that until the 19th century, innovation was a negative word because innovators upset the established order and the powers that be.

In her wonderful book “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World,” McCloskey describes how for all of human history, humans lived on about $3 a day, using today’s dollars. For 200,000 years, the line was essentially flat until around 1800, when a culture that valued innovation spread from England to Europe and the New World. Since then, wealth has skyrocketed, all thanks to a culture willing to let innovators pull up the stakes of the existing stakeholders.

In Silicon Valley, where government’s touch is light, we can see the rapidity of innovation at work. In health care, education and other areas where the government’s hand is heavy, we see stakeholders holding on for dear life. (Read the rest.)