Everyone In the World Getting Rich!

FREE MARKET CAPITALISM, in its modern high tech form, is, most of us might agree, the greatest engine of economic prosperity ever devised by man. If everyone would work hard, make good decisions, and have unlimited opportunity in a truly free market, which means without corporate monopolies, the sky's the limit. We could all end up living in four thousand square foot homes in lovely neighborhoods, with three or four fancy cars in everyone's garage, a swimming pool out back, and so forth. The way things are right now, of course, there is no free market, the is instead a world wide corporate oligopoly, a virtual monopoly of a few big corporations in every area; financial services, oil, you name it. and because of this lack of real free market competition, all economic ills arise, including unemployment, and poverty. Break up the big boys, world wide, and we all get rich. Bank on it. Also, of course, not everyone works hard and makes good decisions. If all of us begin to do that, watch out! Neverthless, the global middle class is growing, modestly, especially in China and India, and poverty is being alleviated, albeit much too slowly, and there are no laws of nature which say that we can't all be rich, eventualy, with true free market economics. The question becomes; how rich do we want all of us to be? At the four thousand square foot three car garage level? Again, in theory, its possible. In fact, so great an economist as the great John Maynard Keynes asked that very question: "at what point does catitalism fulfill its entire growth potential, and bring prosperity to everyone?" Some day energy, education, medicine, food, clothing, transportation, all the basics, might be free. Do we really want a world with seven billion mansions? We don't seem to want a world with several million mansions and several billion hungry people right down the road; you can tell that we don't want this world, the one we regretabbly now have, by observaing the number of people who seem to be thoroughly disgusted with it. And you can't blame them. But some fine day, we'll all be rich, if we're not careful what we wish for.