If you lived in a tyranny – where the threat or possibility of the seizure of your wealth is a fact of life – would you buy all the things you have now, or would you hide your money, stashing it someplace where you hoped it was safe from being taken?

What happens to money?

When you spend your money, or use it to buy stocks and mutual funds, or put it into a bank account, what happens as a result?  

When you spend money, the stores, their employees, the manufacturing companies, and their employees all make a living from it – they depend on your purchases for their own well-being.

When you buy stocks, whether directly or through mutual funds, you pay money to other individuals, who can then use that money to purchase things they need; some will then use the money you paid to create a new business, to hire and pay new employees, to make new products which you may then decide are a great buy.

When you put your money into a bank account, the bank then loans that money out to others, for home mortgages, auto loans, and to start new businesses that will soon hire and pay new employees.

That is economic freedom – the “Pursuit of Happiness”.  Economic freedom is a huge part of what individual rights and freedom is all about.

Dictators vs. economic freedom

Those people who live under dictatorships and tyranny, who must horde and hide their wealth out of necessity, necessarily hobble that country’s economy.  The many would-be business owners and employees remain at the poverty level, jobless and destitute – or in desperation they hire on with the dictator, following his orders for a paycheck and survival, and so become a drain on those few productive ones, being paid by increased taxes.

“Economic freedom”?  That is a fiction invented by the Americans – the same dastardly Americans who make life so difficult for the dictator and, he claims, for the people of “his” country.  “If we had the Americans’ money,” he claims, “we would be rich.”

 But money cannot be seized.  Too, as Venezuela has discovered to their detriment, simply printing more money just makes that money worthless.  Money that comes from nowhere goes nowhere.

Meanwhile, in America ...  

Despite wannabe-dictator Joe Biden’s similar inflation-causing printing of more money, American businesses still struggle to be as productive as possible, given Biden’s actions.  

Since Biden became President, business owners – whether they be outright 100% owners, or holders of stock in a company – continue to understand that it remains possible in America to be productive; that all the impediments that the government puts in the way of businesses are usually not crippling, and that those which are crippling can usually be successfully fought, in another American institution:  an independent court system that is not controlled by the President.

“The Economy”

The American economy works, not because the Economy is some big, monolithic structure that includes America’s citizens only as a peripheral fringe element.  

The American economy is the composite sum total of all the plans, decisions, and actions that each and every one of us make, and that the companies large and small that we own and operate likewise make.  

The more successful each of us individually is at being productive, the bigger is the Economy.

Dictators fail to understand – or do not care, as long as they are in power – what their countries’ economy truly is, and so they impoverish their countries’ people with every plan, decision, and action they take.

We are the American economy.  And that is saying something not often realized or understood, but very, very important and powerful – so powerful that the rest of the world looks at America – as a seeming monolith – with awe.

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