Many people are wicked and violent, and these are the ones with a comparative advantage in taking control of government as we know it. Given this reality, one might expect that life everywhere would tend toward an equilibrium like the Hobbsian scenario: poor, nasty, brutish, and short, even if not solitary.
Yet historically such has not been the case always and everywhere. Over substantial areas of the world, conditions have become much better in terms of economic well-being, life expectancy, health, and even social harmony. How has this progress been possible?
The answer most economic historians now advance is that certain institutions, especially relatively secure private property rights and respect for entrepreneurship and private contracting, were put in place, prompting entrepreneurs of many sorts to devise productivity-enhancing innovations and thereby to make possible great material gains for the average person, even those outside the ruling circles.
At a deeper level, however, it is important to recognize that in nearly all societies, love keeps breaking through: love of truth, love of beauty, love of goodness and kindness toward our fellows. To these breakthroughs we owe much of what has been achieved throughout history. Wickedness produces slavery, oppression, and plunder. Love throws a benign wrench in the wheels of wickedness. Before the great institutional advances could be put in place, love had to clear a space for them.
The cliche tells us that love is the answer. However trite it may be, it is also true.
- Robert Higgs
