It’s a Jetsons World

We are surrounded by miracles created in the private sector, particularly in the digital universe, and yet we don’t appreciate them enough. Meanwhile, the public sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter.

Jeffrey Tucker in It’s a Jetsons World, draws detailed attention to both. He points out that the products of digital capitalism are astounding — more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine.

Indeed the pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal of correspondence. And no one uses the telephone unless a call has already been scheduled in advance.

Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this progress possible — the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of “miracle fatigue” — too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all.

And why? We absorb amazing things and don’t think much about their source or the system that produces them. We don’t appreciate the market.

The Jetsons’ world of rapid innovation is our world, but there is one major difference — and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have were it not for the government’s promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic Leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life down to the smallest detail. This is what keeps getting in our way.

With good, incisive economic sense and an indelible wit, this book will inspire love for free markets — and loathing of government.