Life Isn't A Zero Sum Game

Excerpts from "Illiberal Beliefs" segment at Le Quebecois Libre:

[...]And yet, many continue to believe that in a (relatively) free and open marketplace, if a company gets rich, it is surely because it has ripped off its customers. The grain of truth that makes this flawed interpretation seem plausible is that some companies curry favour with governments, hence circumventing the need to compete fairly for consumers' dollars.

Along a similar vein, some people imagine that today's rich nations got rich at the expense of those nations that remain poor to this day. Again, there is a grain of truth that gives this argument its force. The governments of some powerful nations and their cronies have exploited and continue to exploit people in poorer, weaker nations, and in the past, this was indeed the primary way some predatory nations got rich. Still, it doesn't take a libertarian to see the flaw in this line of thinking. No less an advocate of redistribution on a planetary scale than Jeffrey Sachs skewers the notion that today's rich got rich by stealing from the poor. In The End of Poverty, he writes, "This interpretation of events would be plausible if gross world product had remained roughly constant, with a rising share going to the powerful regions and a declining share going to the poorer regions. However, this is not at all what happened." Instead, Sachs tells us, in the last two hundred years, "Gross world product rose nearly fiftyfold." If it were only, or even primarily, a matter of exploitation, where would all of that extra wealth have come from? Sachs concludes, "The key fact of modern times is not the transfer of income from one region to another, by force or otherwise, but rather the overall increase in world income, but at a different rate in different regions.[...]

As I've said before, it's all the rage to bash capitalism. Now we're presented with the notion it must be "reigned" in and the government is the right entity to do that.

Of course.

The concept of liberty is so alien to people it's considered "radical." Or we actually believe ourselves to be free. We're not.

There's a difference between government growing in proportion to population growth (which is normal and acceptable) and it stretching its powers into areas it need not to (which is not acceptable).