Some businesses would rather avoid competition and prefer instead to rely on government help in the form of special incentives, regulations, or other anti-competitive policies. Fred Smith has spent his career fighting that approach to business. Smith is founder and chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and directs CEI’s Center for Advancing Capitalism. He discussed his work with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. Here’s a taste:
Kokai: … What is the first step that we ought to take now to get back toward the path of supporting more dynamism and not letting stasis become too much of a force?
Smith: I think one thing we have to do is to recognize that narratives are important. We have to tell stories about the heroism. There’s been a tendency over the last century, really, or more, to tell negative stories about business. We talk about the wealth these people earn themselves. We don’t talk about the wealth they earned for societies.
We don’t talk about the equality that became possible when the cellphone made it possible for handicapped people to live, or the computer, much more meaningful lives. We don’t talk about the technologies that made it possible for Africa to bypass the whole landline world of telephone because they could never have afforded that. And now that world, that whole continent is beginning to be in contact with the greatest knowledge in the world. With Google they have more access to knowledge than a person studying at Harvard Library did 50 years ago.
All of that is the story about how innovation, how dynamism, doesn’t only make us richer and freer, it also makes the world a more stable, resilient place because we’re continuously able to move away from the shortages of today to the infinite resource of the mind tomorrow.
And most importantly, especially for people who are skeptical of markets, we have to recognize that nothing has done more to democratize the privileges that only the wealthy ones, only the elites once had, than capitalism in its dynamic form. Nothing has been fairer, freer, or more stabilizing than capitalism in its dynamic form, and we need to keep that freedom, that dynamism alive. Otherwise we’re … being immoral for the future.
