Speaking at the 1992 Democratic Presidential Convention, Late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas counseled that, to create sound economic policy, “You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers.” Alternatively, in the spirit of this blog, we might paraphrase him: “You cannot love products and hate producers.” I take him to mean that…
“The rapid economic development of the United States is frequently taken for granted, treated as a nonproblem that requires little formal analysis. To many historians, American prosperity is simply a logical extension of natural abundance.” So writes historian Thomas Doerflinger, in his book A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise. For him, this spirit explains much more fundamentally why some countries prosper…