Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (35 page)

Or take the real-world example of two kids who graduate from college with honors. One is an admirable idealist. The other is on the make. The idealist joins Friends of the Earth and chains himself to a sequoia. The sharpie goes to work for an investment bank selling fishy derivatives and makes $500,000 a year. Even assuming that the selfish young banker cheats the IRS—and he will—he’ll end up paying $100,000 a year in taxes: income tax, property tax, sales tax, etc.

While the admirable idealist has saved one tree (if the logging company doesn’t own bolt cutters), the pirate in a necktie has contributed to society $100,000 worth of schools, roads, and U.S. Marines, not to mention Interior Department funding sufficient to save any number of trees and the young idealists chained thereto.

And if the soulless yuppie cheats the IRS so well that he ends up keeping the whole half million? That cash isn’t going to sit in his cuff link box. Whether spent or saved, the money winds up invested somewhere, and maybe that investment leads to the creation of the twenty-first century’s equivalent of the moldboard plow, the microchip, or the mocha latte. Society wins. Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heroes. They don’t usually mean to be, but that’s their problem, not ours.

Almost everyone in the world now admits that the free market tells us the economic truth. Economic liberty makes wealth. Economic repression makes poverty.

Poverty is hard, wretched, and humiliating. Poverty is schoolgirl prostitutes trying to feed their parents in Cuba. Poverty is John driving around in the Tanzanian night looking for the doctor while his daughter dies. It’s grandmothers begging on the streets of Moscow. But what poverty is not is sad. Poverty is infuriating. These things don’t have to happen. These conditions don’t need to exist. We can’t solve all the problems of life, but we can solve the problem of gross, worldwide material deprivation. The solution doesn’t work perfectly. The solution doesn’t work uniformly. Nonetheless, the solution works. If we can’t fix everything, let’s fix the easy stuff. We know how to get rid of poverty. We know how to create wealth. But because of laziness, fear, complacency, love of power, or foolish idealism, we refuse to do it.

We think we can dabble in freedom—allow a few of its liberties and leave our favorite constraints in place. We think we can screw around with the free market—skip its costs and get all of its benefits anyway.

There is a joke that I think President Reagan used to tell to illustrate the attitude that some people have toward the blessings they get from freedom and private property. If Reagan didn’t tell the joke, he should have. He won’t mind the attribution. Doubtless he’s forgotten all about economics now. And I’m with the president on that. I intend to start forgetting about economics as soon as I can—keeping in mind, however, a few rudimentary conceits, such as the one about the traveling salesman who is staying overnight with a farm family. When the family sits down to eat, there’s a pig in a chair at the table. The pig has three medals hanging around its neck and a wooden leg. The salesman says, “Um, I see a pig is having dinner with you.”

“Yep,” says the farmer. “That’s because he’s a very special pig. You see those medals around his neck? Well, the first medal is from when our baby son fell in the pond and was drowning, and that pig dove in, swam out, and saved his life. The second medal, that’s from when our little daughter was trapped in a burning barn, and that pig ran inside, carried her out, and saved her life. And the third medal, that’s from when our oldest boy was cornered in the stockyard by a mean bull, and that pig ran under the fence, bit the bull’s tail, and saved the boy’s life.”

“Yes,” says the salesman, “I can see why you let that pig sit right at the table and have dinner with you. And I can see why you awarded him the medals. But how did he get the wooden leg?”

“Well,” says the farmer, “a pig like that—you don’t eat him all at once.”