Smart people and profit motive have made world a better place

By David McElroy · November 16, 2016

I ordered a camera lens Monday night on Amazon.com. It was a pretty standard order. It’s not an expensive item. I didn’t pay a nickel extra for shipping. It’s pretty routine.

But this order reminds me how much our lives have improved — and how much we take those improvements for granted.

I got a shipment notification for the lens Wednesday morning. I had no idea where it was coming from. I didn’t care. But when I clicked a button in my email to track the FedEx package, a light bulb went off for me.

On the tracking page, I noticed the package was picked up by FedEx in Seongnam-si, South Korea — which is a satellite city near Seoul — at the end of the Wednesday business day there. Somehow, it will be delivered to me in Birmingham on Thursday.

An untold number of people are involved in getting my routine order fulfilled from the other side of the world all the way to me — and I never had to give a second thought to how any of it happens.

It’s a modern form of magic we call logistics.

How did it happen that this system exists — a system that gives me exactly what I want when I want it without any effort from me?

Did FedEx founder Fred Smith have me in mind when he dreamed up the idea for overnight delivery around the country? Of course not.

Did the various pioneers of the tech industry care about a transportation company’s need to communicate instantly around the world? No way.

Did the people who dreamed up the planes and trucks used to bring my package think about me? Nope.

These smart people were motivated by their own needs and desires. Some wanted the excitement of invention, but most wanted the personal profit that comes to those who meet the needs of others in a free market.

Fred Smith’s crazy idea for a package delivery company was a back-up plan after the U.S. Federal Reserve system declined to contract with him to haul checks and other banking documents around the country. It was a crazy idea. Few people gave him any chance of being successful. In desperation, he once gambled in Las Vegas to find immediate cash to keep going. He even had to keep his planes in the air at one point to stop them from being seized in Memphis by creditors.

But he and thousands of other eventual employees found a way to make it work. Early investors in the company took huge risks and then later investors took increasingly smaller risks. Eventually, we started taking overnight delivery for granted.

And now, we take quick delivery from anywhere in the world for granted — from FedEx and its various competitors.

None of these people went into business to make sure I got a lens from Korea quickly this week. They didn’t know I existed. They didn’t know I would ever want a lens right now.

They all wanted to make their own lives better through profit.

Some people today believe profit is a dirty word — they call it “greed” — but the profit motive is what has given us the advances that have made our lives so much better.

(It’s true that the technical foundations of the Internet were laid through research paid for by the U.S. government. I believe the same innovations would have happened without government involvement, but I don’t want to get sidetracked on that point.)

When you see planes in the air and big trucks on the road and thunderous diesel engines on train tracks, remember that all of this has been fueled by the desire of wealthy people to make a profit and smart people with ideas to get rich.

The combination of ideas and capital have brought us amazing things. They’ve brought us millions of jobs. They’ve brought us a luxurious lifestyle. They’ve brought us an insanely great selection of goods and services from around the world. All because “greedy” people wanted to make a buck — and change the world.

I’ll be happy to get my lens quickly all the way from Korea, but it would never have happened without brilliant and wealthy people guided by the desire to make a profit.

Economic freedom makes everybody better off. Profit drives the engine of prosperity.

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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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