A quick plug for this excellent weblog of Daniel Ben-Ami, a freelance journalist who knows his economics. Daniel holds the heretical belief that material prosperity is a good thing and has debunked some of the recent nonsense about how people are made “unhappy” by material wealth. His site is definitely worth a regular visit.
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Defending prosperityJuly 10th, 2007 |
 7 comments to Defending prosperity |
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If anyone believes that their material wealth is making them unhappy they can give the money to me.
Being cold and hungry and sick made me unhappy. Wealth may not automatically make people happy, but people with wealth can buy blankets and triple-pane windows and home insulation and gas for the water heater and food and clean drinking water and medicine.
Thus Sunfish has spoken and refuted the “forward to the Pleistoceine” socialists.
I’ve never heard of him before but his article “A Sneaky Attack on Prosperity” is certainly enlightening.
It is other people being wealthy and having higher social status that makes people unhappy. In particular sociologists and psychiatrists from privileged backgrounds are often deeply iritated that they are not respected or rewarded as much as vulgar popular entertainers or businessmen, and would like us to know that this is all wrong and very bad for us.
Ben-Ami is of the Spiked/Institute of Ideas liberatarian tendency.
Money can’t buy happiness – but it certainly helps with the instalments.
Whoever said money can’t buy happiness never went shopping with my first wife.
Guy Herbert is quite correct.
Ludwig Von Mises was fond of pointing out that many people resented those of lesser edcuation or culture having more money than them – and so came to believe, and argue, that civil society (the process of civil interaction by which this came to pass) was somehow in need of “control”.
The “Anticapitalist Mentality” is an example of Mises making this point.
However, the mentality is ancient – it goes back to Plato and, most likely, before.