I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked.

The subtitle of this opinion by in the NYT (Dec. 2019) is, "Two cheers for capitalism, now and forever." Here are some money quotes.

• "government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn’t because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated."
• "capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out. If you want to run a rental car company, capitalism has a whole bevy of market and price signals and feedback loops that tell you what kind of cars people want to rent, where to put your locations, how many cars to order."
• "that kind of knowledge does produce enormous wealth."
• "capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human history."
• "planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and scarcity. What’s worse is what happens when the political elites learn what you can do with that scarcity. They turn scarcity into corruption."
• "we need more and better capitalism."
• "We need a massive infusion of money and reform into our education systems, from infancy through life."
• "We need worker co-ops, which build skills and represent labor at the negotiating table. We need wage subsidies and mobility subsidies, so people can afford to move to opportunity. We need tax subsidies for health care, to make it easier for people to switch jobs. We need a higher earned-income tax credit, to give the working poor financial security so they don’t get swept away amid the creative destruction. We need a carbon tax, to give everyone an incentive to reduce carbon emissions without pretending we know the best way to do it."