Postrel on Productivity
From the Dynamist Blog, Virginia Postrel directs us to her latest column in the NYT.
The moral of the story: trade increases productivity. By definition, higher productivity makes everyone richer because we're producing more stuff with fewer inputs. There's an important policy lesson here: a lot of the money governments are spending on "development"--business incubators, eminent domain takings for Wal-Mart, and ever present "education" and job training programs--is probably being wasted.
That isn't to say that development goals aren't laudable. I want the unemployed & uneducated in my neighborhood to have a decent standard of living. The fact of the matter is, though, the path to that "decent standard of living" doesn't lie through state intervention. It lies through de-intervention: specifically, the state needs to get out of the way and let the market work.
