US ECONOMY

US Economy

US Economy

In light of the current financial downturn, the United States Federal Government should not substantially increase social services for persons living in poverty in the United States. They should focus on the stabilizing the economy which will help the poor in the long run.

Sustained economic progress and advances in civilization result, fundamentally, from the interest, effort, freedom and opportunity of individuals to legally acquire private property (land and capital) and accumulate wealth. Private property rights-the precondition of all economic progress-gives the individual security and self-worth. Hence, the individual's rational inclination or incentive to combine labour, capital, land and entrepreneurship to produce wealth and accumulate the physical, human, and intellectual capital necessary to make continuing economic progress possible. In other words, given the opportunities to lawfully acquire property and the freedom to accumulate wealth, the individual is motivated to create, to innovate, to produce the goods and services demanded by society, to trade them and earn a profit. That is how we have come to understand the connection between economic freedom and economic growth, and to value the crucial importance of private property rights.

Within a positive environment of institutional stability and technological advances, the degree of individual willingness and abilities is what ultimately facilitates the more productive use of economic resources and the accumulation of capital necessary for future economic growth. A problem arises, however, when morality of behaviour, social concerns, and the basic elements of justice are increasingly ignored by the individual in the market place. In other words, it is not the selfish interest, greed or the individual desire for pleasure what creates progress. A society that grants absolute individual freedom on the sole basis of selfish motives would only promote an unsustainable system of capital concentration, exploitation, corruption and social polarization. Progress is not, either, the result of man's natural desire to work hard or of man's concern for his fellow countryman or for mankind. A society that plans solely on those premises is doom to economic disaster or ends up coercing their population to increase the level of production.

It is, then, the degree to which society succeeds in establishing its rules and values what promotes and molds individual actions toward the fulfilments of the desire to own private property and accumulate capital. The more equitable the individual opportunities, the greater are the chances of an individual to compete in the market place. This competition tends to foster innovation, to generate higher levels of productivity, higher profits, more investment, more employment and greater national wealth. Societies that only grant individual freedom and opportunities to a particular sector of the population and invest little or inefficiently in human capital, become dual societies. On one side, a sector develops and progresses until the other sector, which operates at a subsistence level becomes fatigued, unproductive and powerless to sustain the necessary levels of production, income and development. These conditions drag the entire society into the cycle of social unrest that we often see in poor ...