People make decisions based on the values they hold most dear. Those might be family values related to happiness, health and economic security. Or they may be the achievement ethics of hard work and duty. Or they may be broader values regarding helping others, or even saving the world through charity and conservation. All the economic choices people make are shaped by their values.
“What do I know?” Today, you can answer: I am a person with access to any knowledge I need and to tools of immense power. I am networked to virtually everyone in the world, who can provide knowledge, resources, and collaboration on any issue. All resources are accessible to me.
Each individual is free, using individual knowledge and skill, to do his or her best within the general rules that apply to all, and is free to learn from the experience, and, if the experience is not what was intended, to try to succeed via a different approach next time. That is the essence of the free society.
We are losing the desire, the hunger, the sense of exploration and risk to make the world a better place. The energy comes from individual entrepreneurs, innovators, founders and researchers. The more we suppress such individualism, the more the decivilization process accelerates.
How does LeBron James make the right decision that generates the most satisfaction for the most people, including but not limited to himself. He applies the principles of economics.
America slowly but surely lost her sense of robust private ownership, the soul of a free society. It happened through the tax and regulatory state, jettisoning economic substantive due process, absurd readings of the Commerce Clause, and through the creation of wildly extra-constitutional administrative agencies.
The emergence of a managerial class was aimed at eliminating the influence of owners and shareholders. Much of the industry that has grown up around managerial processes, “strategy”, consulting and business school studies is just an accumulation of additional managerial costs and expanded managerial staffing, with no consumer value.
Without the hierarchical power of coercive government, policy-makers would have no policies to make, and there would be no wheeling and dealing with capital owners. The former would need to contribute to the economy rather than be a burden on it, and the latter would be strictly servants of consumers.
Friedrich Hayek believed that there will never be good money again until it is taken out of the hands of government. “All we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.”
As consumers of knowledge, we can no longer be passive. Knowing is a practice at which we can each improve our capability. Knowledge entrepreneurs are creating new ways of developing, diffusing, and using knowledge, and devices are giving us new means of access and engagement.
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