What's pissing me off these days are those folks who spout off about how the free market is the cure for everything. Don't prosecute Microsoft because, well, the free market will take care of it. Let's just ignore the fact that it is patents and copyrights that underpin the Microsoft monopoly and they have everything to do with government intervention and NOTHING to do with the great free market. Etc. etc. etc.

What also pisses me off are those folks who reduce everything down to economic growth. You get people like Arnold Kling who writes a fine essay about how ethics are the necessary underpinning for prosperity, but then ignores his own words and claims that prosperity depends on economic growth.

This is not to say that material improvements are a bad thing, but let's get some realism here, please. This free market stuff is starry-eyed pablum that passes for economic thought. The internet was not the triumph of the free market; it was the creation of military (i.e. government) research let loose on a democratic society.

If they want to laud a free market, then the market they should be praising is the one of ideas, not of things. Because Kling is right, prosperity is based on the realization of some important ideas. To cheapen this insight because there happens to be a certain kind of measureable economic growth is shameful.

What is economic growth, anyway? What numbers are we using? I can guarantee you what the numbers are NOT included: the cost of cleaning up the pollution and the cost of resource depletion. Not that pollution HARMS us in any way or that we must DEFEND our resources for future security.

But I forgot. New technology will solve these problems, sometime in the future, just like it has replenished the forests of Greece denuded millenia ago, so there's no need to have a full and accurate accounting. Let's just shift those losses to some off-shore holdings, like Argentina or China.

The problem is that if we focus the discussion to prosperity being dependent on the growth of the free market of ideas, then we have to deal straight up with resource use inequities, oil dependencies, throw-away consumerism, and the like, and we all know how much fun that isn't. It means that we may have to change our ways, desire less, and spread the benefits around. Oh, screw it, let's just stick with economic growth, it's so much more fun.