Entrepreneurs Create Abundance. Bureaucrats Create Scarcity

Since 2000, TVs became 10,304 percent more abundant while hospital services became 38.6 percent less abundant.

Mark Perry does a great chart that illustrates the relative changes in the nominal prices of a variety of products and services.

We used Mark’s chart to do time prices relative to average hourly wages and then calculated the change in abundance or scarcity. Note that our chart does not include TVs. TVs became 10,304 percent more abundant. If we had included TVs, they would have dwarfed all the other items.

What is the difference between growing abundance and growing scarcity? In a word, government. When government enters a market it typically influences supply or demand or both. If you increase demand through subsidies you increase prices. If you restrict supply with occupational licensing and regulations you increase prices. If you do both, like the items above in red, you really really increase prices.

Since 2000, TVs became 10,304 percent more abundant while hospital services became 38.6 percent less abundant. Imagine if the time prices of hospital services had dropped over 99 percent like TVs? What does this suggest? If we want more abundance and less scarcity, we really need more entrepreneurs and free markets and fewer bureaucrats and politicians.

We explain and empirically demonstrate why more people with freedom means much more resource abundance for everyone in our new book, Superabundance, available at Amazon. You can read more at superabundance.com. There has never been a better time to create more life.

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.