By Ezra Wyrick, Mises Institute
The war on the producer is raging on, and the assault on free enterprise and the entrepreneur is hitting an all-time high. Whether it be politicians, academics, or the mainstream media, there’s a relentless effort to paint those who create wealth and prosperity as villains who do nothing but exploit the masses.
This is not just a misguided moral crusade, but it also amounts to an egregious intellectual fraud as it completely ignores fundamental principles of economics and the basic human desire to succeed. It is time to stand up and push back hard against this narrative for the sake of our future as a civilization.
Simply put, producers are the backbone of any economy. Without them, there would be no wealth, no innovation, and no progress. The producer takes risks, invests time and resources, and creates products and services that others will want to buy. The producer’s success is not usually a result of exploitation or of “privilege” but of hard work, ingenuity, and the willingness to take risks to provide value to his fellow man. Yet, despite this fundamental truth, the producer has been subject to a barrage of attacks from those who seek to undermine the principles of free enterprise. The producer is often accused of greed, exploitation, and selfishness, while the virtues of hard work, innovation, and rational self-interest are ignored or dismissed as “Randian” dogma.
The core of this dishonest attack on the producer is the belief that the accumulation of wealth is inherently immoral. This belief is rooted in a false zero-sum view of economics, in which one person’s gain necessarily comes at the expense of another’s loss. In the framework of this argument, individuals who thrive in commerce are purportedly doing so via the exploitation of their labor force or via an unfair advantage, be it an inheritance, political connections, or some other form of unnatural “privilege”—of course, this argument conveniently ignores the...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FREE, HERE).
