OPINION:
Like every election cycle, 2024 will come down to economics. Despite the bluster of big personalities and the petty partisanship that dominates today’s discourse, pocketbook issues like inflation will reign supreme. They always do.
According to recent Pew polling, strengthening the U.S. economy is indeed voters’ top policy priority in 2024. And that has nothing to do with vice presidential picks or high-profile donor meetings; it has everything to do with the pocketbook, the most bipartisan issue there is.
Will Americans take a step toward economic freedom, or will the steady decline into ever-larger government overreach continue? If the 2024 election is the most consequential of our lifetime, as we often hear, the direction of U.S. economic policy is the most consequential.
I hope for a national embrace of the free market. But it seems both major parties are turning away from the system that has made America the most successful economy in history. On the one side, we find the old leftist rejection of free enterprise; on the other, the new national conservative hostility to free trade. Both parties are wedded to deficit-funded spending.
Therefore, we must remind ourselves of some basic truths: Capitalism creates wealth and saves lives. Socialism and protectionism always fail. By a large margin, the free market is the most successful weapon against poverty ever, and it will continue to lift up the poor if we allow it.
Just look at the data: 200 hundred years ago, at the birth of industrial capitalism, there were only about 80 million people in the world who were not living in extreme poverty, meaning $2 a day or less, adjusted for inflation. Today, more than 7.3 billion people are not living in extreme poverty.
Why? The free market. Economic growth and poverty reduction started in places where and in periods when major steps were being taken to protect property rights, promote business and investment and expand trade. People, goods and services traveled across borders, and countless millions prospered.
Except the number isn’t “countless.” From 2002 to 2022, nearly 1 billion people moved out of extreme poverty globally. Astonishingly, roughly 135,000 people escaped poverty every day. The primary reason is economic freedom, with even totalitarian regimes such as China embracing some form of economic liberalization.
With such overwhelming evidence, why do so many people neglect the beneficial effects of the free market? One reason is that statistics rarely move us emotionally. As Stalin once said in the opposite context: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”
The same goes for progress. When one man rises out of poverty, we feel it viscerally and empathize. A million people rising out of poverty, however, is just a statistic.
Therefore, it is important to emphasize that such a data point is made up of 1 million real people of flesh and blood, hopes and fears, who can now, for the first time, put food on the table and send their kids to school. The most powerful testament to the free market’s positive impact lies in the lives that are changed for the better.
Such stories are perfectly encapsulated in the new documentary “She Rises Up,” which chronicles the journeys of three remarkable female entrepreneurs in developing nations who are lifting up their entire communities through business activity. From manufacturing to commerce, the three women have fought the odds to launch and expand small businesses, creating jobs where the government could not and offering prosperity that had never existed before in their neighborhoods.
Critics of capitalism may want to ignore these stories, but those of us who believe in the free market can never forget them. There are too many human stories to ignore, and there is no better time to tell them than now.
Stripping away the political noise, my hope in 2024 is for a greater understanding that economics is not just about numbers but about people. Whenever someone says that they want to control the market and restrict trade, they really seek to control and restrict people — and their creativity and dreams.
Whether you trust in anecdotal or empirical evidence, there is no better policy than economic freedom. That’s how we all continue to rise up and up again.
• Johan Norberg is an author, lecturer and documentary filmmaker born in Sweden. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington.
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