Thomas Sowell on
the limits of power. He notes that wherever slavery has existed, there have been always been certain slaves who were paid for their services --usually for work involving skill, judgment or creativity as opposed to brute work.
Tasks involving judgment or talents were different because no one can know how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.
This is the point that people criticizing capitalism miss (except when they are not actually criticizing capitalism at all, but crony capitalism, in which big business colludes with government to impede competition).
so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seem to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.
Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.
That's important to understand from the point of view of economic recovery. Even more important is that this Congress & this administration don't understand that they are creating a race of brutes and passives by setting up an economy that stifles all the aspects of work that make it human.
