Johan Norberg got my message across in the October 2nd Wall Street Journal. He says: 'Commerce is the driving engine of modernity.'
Norberg doesn’t have it quite right because he focuses on entrepreneurs rather than commerce as a whole. I’ve pointed out that in Japan corporations provide innovation rather than entrepreneurs. Look at Toyota and the Hybrid as a good example and Sony and the Walkman.
Norberg also tries to contrast entrepreneurial success versus government. He suggests that government is not much of a contributor to modern society.
This is going too far for me. Governments provide streets, highways and airports generally more efficiently than commerce. The U.S. government has created many important technological innovations from the first card sorters for the Census in 1870, to airplanes for WWI, airlines out of the Postal Service routes in the 1920s, 1938 radar, 1947 transistors and 1968 ARPAnet the mother of the Internet. I’ve left out much including jet engines, the whole satellite, GPS and undersea worlds.
I’m glad to see a champion of commerce and one that a number of my friends have quoted, but he could do a better job.