At the John Stossel luncheon I recently attended, I picked up a book entitled "The Morality of Capitalism," a collection of essays edited by Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network, a Libertarian organization.
One of the essays is by a Black, South African economist named Temba A. Nolutshungu. It contains a paragraph that should be the talking point of every Republican presidential candidate:
"Job creation is not the role of the state. For jobs to be sustainable(*), they have to be created by the private sector. Government generated jobs are at the taxpayer's expense and amount to subsidized employment. Being unsustainable, they have no positive economic consequence. The private sector is the main creator of wealth, and the state sector a consumer (of wealth)"
* That's the kind of "sustainability" we should be talking about.
As evidence of the proposition that prosperity is the result of economic freedom, Mr. Nolutshungu sites what happened in China when, in 1992, Deng Xiaoping pushed through broad economic reform. (Do you remember his famous remark, "It is glorious to get rich"?) Then he quoted economist Bertel Schmitt: "the United States picked up the socialist economic playbook that Deng Xiaoping was smart enough to throw away."
God help us if this election leads to the adoption of even more of that playbook.
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