If ‘we’, instead of focusing our competitive drive on producing something more efficient than the other guy, had spent all our competitive energy playing football and chess, we would likely have starved to death by now:).

On a more serious note, competition only makes us worse off when some amongst us can improve their relative ranking by banning and prohibiting others from competing as vigorously as they otherwise would.

The causes of the current credit meltdown are too much regulation, not too little. Were it not for various levels of governments’ ability to, through zoning laws and the like, make the simple act of providing a roof over ones head, almost prohibitively expensive, we would not have had a debt run-up to begin with. Guaranteed. Strip away all regulation involving building and construction, and there would be an immense supply of dwellings, likely several per head.

In every unregulated industry, overproduction is the norm. The simple fact that not all providers judge future demand with equal accuracy, with some inevitably over estimating it, ensures that. Only in regulated industries like housing, health care and education, can those better off and politically connected prevent this from happening, in order to maintain their own power and status as gatekeepers to a scarce resource.

Simply get government at every level out of people’s lives, decisions and wallets, and a society at our current technological sophistication would provide an absolute overabundance of virtually everything to virtually everyone. There is simply no reason, other than the vanity of the political classes, for government to play a larger role in people’s lives today that they did when America was first formed.

As I’ve written before, a Californian real estate market devoid of regulation, would likely have the vast majority of the population living in huge condos in one of a wall of 40-60 story high-rises stretching from Cape Mendocino to Cabo San Lucas. With high speed rail running the length close behind. While the ‘rich’ would likely still live ‘better’, by occupying larger, nicer equipped units on higher floors, even the so called ‘poor’ would at least have a spacious beachfront condo. Not too shabby compared with the kind of rat infested projects our ‘progressive’ overlords currently see fit to provide them with.