“Capitalism hasn’t failed the poor. Government has failed the poor.” That’s one of the better lines in the opening moments of my recent speech, “In Defense of Capitalism,” at TEDxFultonStreet.
It was a case of Dennis in the Lion’s Den: You can click here
to get the full 13 minutes of me onstage, playing to a rather resistant audience–young, liberal New Yorkers who want to save the world.
Some other excerpts:
“In America it feels like you’re supposed to feel guilty about (getting rich) today. That desire to get rich is what drove the American dream. It’s what makes our economy the most innovative in the world. In America we should be proud to get rich–and happy to for those who get richer.”
“America does all it can to guarantee equal opportunity, but it doesn’t guarantee equal outcome. That part is up to us.”
And this is a particularly pivotol proclamation:
“The poor are not poor because they’re in jobs that don’t pay enough. Only 3% of people with full-time jobs live in poverty. (This statement is corrected from a misworded line in the speech itself). Over 90% of the poor don’t have jobs at all. They’re poor because the don’t have jobs, and they would have jobs if we created jobs for them.
“Government is not the way to do it. Capitalism and business is the way to do it.”
One last thing: In the speech, I predict that Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century,” will set a new record for books that everyone buys but which no one really reads. And a WSJ story confirms it: Kindle reading data from Amazon show virtually no buyer of this book has read much of it at all. They highlight statements that appear in only the first 2.4% of the book, then stop.
Good to hear.