Dan McLaughlin

Why do professional athletes make so much more money than, say, professional teachers? Do people really value sports more than they value education? Dan McLaughlin writes that teachers provide a service that is generally accepted as contributing real value to the development of society. Some people view sports, however, as superfluous. They think of it as something that society could function well without. It doesn’t seem to make sense...

“Don’t take any wooden nickels” was an admonition to be careful in your dealings because someone might try to pay you with worthless money. Wooden coins were actually used in trade in America in certain limited circumstances on a local level. A contemporary equivalent could be “don’t take any steel pennies.” The United States House Of Representatives has already passed a bill, HR 5512, authorizing the Treasury Department to substitute steel for the nickel and copper now used in American pennies and nickels.

Governments institute policies to either boost population or shrink it. In fact, the population question is like any other aspect of the social order: best addressed by the market. If you took the population of today and plugged it into a pre-capitalist age, there would be mass death, to be sure. Supporting this level of population growth requires free economies. There is really no other choice for us. And what about the future? Where will the food come from to feed all of these people? It will come from development. We now have more food per person than we used to, even though world population has doubled since 1961. Developing populations increased per capita calorie intake by 38 percent. The problem of food is a problem of development. As societies advance through trade, so will the food supply.