... Think it through for a moment. There are some people over here that have something they don't value, while there are other people over there who value those things highly. What we'd like is for those things, whatever they are, to move from those who assign little value to them to those who assign a higher value to them.
This is true of anything: this movement of resources from lower to higher valued uses is known as "creating wealth". It is the single most important contributor to the wealth of nations. It is known as "trade".
And our government, in its wisdom, has made it illegal for anyone to broker this increase in individual and national wealth, resulting in the TV cameras of the world panning across rows of empty seats.
What makes it all so anger inducing is that we do know how to solve this problem. It's a solution that was invented before Homo sapiens even came into existence (yes, we do know that trade predates our own species). And that's all that we would need to do here. Simply leave well alone and allow that primitive propensity to truck and barter to work itself out. But the government has made this entirely natural part of our basic make up illegal.
I have an entirely unsupported feeling that this deep-seated resitance to trade and markets in our public life comes from a hangover of the Victoria disdain for "trade". ...
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