I’m too old.
I’m too old, that is, to qualify as a contestant in the “million dollar question” drawing held, this summer, by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). To be eligible to win the million-buck prize (minus taxes!) one must be 18-35 years of age. (I’m a bit older than 35.) FEE is sponsoring this Million Dollar Contest Quiz as a way to promote the idea of a free society and its superiority to never-ending government regulation, taxation and subsidy.
What’s the question?
Nothing other than “what’s behind the affordability crisis?”
The answer, in short, is too much government.
But the quiz format helps explain that better.
“Most people blame capitalism,” we read, “but the reality is different. Healthcare, education, housing, and childcare are some of the most heavily regulated, subsidized, and mandated sectors in the American economy. They aren’t free markets. They’re crippled capitalism; markets distorted by decades of government intervention until they can no longer deliver quality at a price people can afford.”
If you are old, like me, you have probably encountered this case before. (If you read this column, you most definitely have!) But young people? They’re not so lucky. Most have endured public schools and government-regulated and -subsidized universities and received, there, increasingly Marxist nonsense about how capitalism enslaves us all.
When capitalism — basically, free markets with markets in capital goods, making up what Ludwig von Mises called “mass production for the masses” — liberates.
Who? Just white males?
No. Free markets liberate all peaceful people. As the quiz and its answers make clear.
So take the quiz. Learn something. But, if you’re over 35, pass it on to a young person!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Grok Imagine Nano Banana
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One reply on “A Quiz to Teach”
“…but not a real green dress that’s cruel”
Unfortunately, only a tiny minority anywhere in the political continuum are willing to attend to arguments that run counter to their predispositions.
And we are not at all helped when those who believe in markets blithely use terms without regard to how their opponents use them.
In the case of “capitalism” we have a word that, in describing a social order, has never had a definition that both is useful and upon which standard dictionaries agree. But even in the case of “free markets”, a term with a standard and useful definition, we find that the left doesn’t use the term in conformance with that definition. One even finds wholesale category errors in how leftists use the term.
So, to have what very little hope is possible, we must identify and begin with terms that they do understand.