It's a Jetsons World - Read Jim Fulner

Paperback, 320 pages

English language

Published June 23, 2011 by Ludwig von Mises Institute.

ISBN:: 978-1-61016-194-7

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 …

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.

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1 edition

JIm FUlner reviewed It's a Jetsons World by Jeffrey A. Tucker

5 stars

This was utterly fantastic. The more of Tucker I hear, the more I like Tucker. returnreturnFor years I've been using the line "if the government weren't making so many damn roads, the free market would have given me a Jetsonmobile by now" so certainly I was interested in this item. returnreturnBut its not just the roads, and its not just theoretical, we have really overcome the barrier of government in some places, and government actively (attempts) prevents it going the way of the dodo bird in attempts of controlling not only what is on the market, but convincing producers that they need the governments protection. While I good portion of the book is Tucker's review/insight on "Against Intellectual Monopoly" and this certainly made me want to get that book, I think its still great in addition.