What is “Prosperity?”

10,000 years ago when our anscestors were hunter-gatherers, it was a field or a stretch of forest or river that some other family of hunter-gatherers hadn’t pretty well plundered already. You – and, hopefully, your tribe – would have the means to keep up their strength until spring brought a new, less-meager bounty staved off starvation for another year.  Maybe.

Back then, the worst thing that could happen was another tribe moving in and deciding that you, Clan Urk, were going to be Happy To Pay For A Better Clan Thag.  The results meant moving long and far to find more forage.  Or dying.  Or both.

500 years ago, when 999 out of 1000 of our forefathers were subsistance farmers?  Wealth was some extra potatoes or sauerkraut or wheat stored away that nobody else had a claim to, in case there was a drought the next year.  It was the knowledge that your family, and ideally your village, could ride out some of the hard times without starving to death.

The great  impediment to properity for most of our peasant anscenstors?  The nobles who claimed a percentage of what you, the peasant, grew and stored. in exchange for the privilege of having their protection (and the plague, rabies, accidents, wars, cholera, typhus and dropsy).  Their cut came off the top; if your cut wasn’t enough to feed the family?  Well, peasants could always create more kids.

Today?  The topline definitions of “prosperity” have moved quite a bit in the past five to 100 centuries, but in one way or another it’s still the same as it was for both groups of anscestors; make life less tenuous.  Whatever “tenuous” means. 

Of course, we moderns have less to worry about in terms of starvation, plague and dropsy than our hunter-gatherer and feudal forebears. 

The nobles?  Well, they’re still out there, and they’re still a problem.

Why do you work?  Wouldn’t life be a lot more fun if you got to hang out, drink and play Wii all day?  Of course – until you starved!  That’s why, eventually, most people (yes, except the odd trust fund baby) needs to actually work in some way or another to support themselves, whether digging ditches or underwriting bonds.

How prosperous one is is largely – not entirely, but mostly – a function of choices one makes.  Ones’ future hinges to a sometimes depressing extent on choices one makes when one is not old enough to be making life-altering choices.  Decide to knuckle down and get straight “A”s, maybe with the help of a family that encourages it?  Decide to party your way through (or out of) high school?  They’ll likely lead one down different paths by the time one is thirty. 

But once one is on a path – neurosurgeon or night stocker, programmer or truck driver – ones work is what one does to feed oneself and one’s family, to provide shelter and clothing and internet and private school for the kids and that yacht in the Seychelles. 

And whatever one does, whatever ones’ abilities, whatever one did to get to where they are in life, “prosperity” today means the ability to make ones’ life as secure as one can, given the talent they have and the work they do. 

Now, government does have a purpose in ensuring prosperity.  A prosperous city, state and nation need everything from enforceable contracts to safe streets to the rule of laws rather than men to a work force and entrepreneur class that is capable of building the things and institutions needed to prosper.  Those mean courts, law-enforcement, defense, some form of education, and all the kinds of infrastructure that enables commerce, from roads and harbors to currency and a legal system – even the prevention of starvation and epidemics.  The sorts of things a government very well should be doing, within limits.

But a big chunk of our society doesn’t recognize the concept of limited government; to many, government has no limits.  And a government that has no limits – that decides that its job is to provide an income (not “prosperity”, mind you), health insurance, cradle to grave social security and the engineering that society “needs” – is taking a huge, utterly discretionary bite out of your prosperity.  Government becomes another mouth, or two or three, in everyone’s family.  It becomes Clan Thag, competing with all your Clan Urkers for the resources that are out there, making Clan Urk’s – your family’s – existence that much more tenuous.

So I want government to promote, rather than retard, real prosperity.

“But Mitch – what do you mean real prosperity?”

Prosperity that one controls oneself.  Clan Urk doesn’t have to ask Clan Thag for permission to hunt and gather; your group of peasants keeps the grain they grow, rather than giving it to your good-for-nothign duke who hasn’t done a damn useful thing in his life since he got back from Yale.  Because prosperity that exists at someone else’s discretion isn’t prosperity; it’s being a pet.

So that’s what I believe in.

Gosh – I am an extremist!