Private Miracles. It's a Jetson's World.
In the classic and futuristic television series from 1962 to 1963,
I admit that I adore this show and could watch every episode 100 times.
People work only a few hours a day, travel at 500 miles per hour in flying cars that go as fast as 2,500 miles per hour.
And the main job is pushing buttons.
The galaxy is their home.
Healthcare is a complete free market with extreme customer care.
Technology is the best, but of course it still malfunctions and must be fixed, same as today.
Business is rivalrous, prosperity is everywhere and the state largely irrelevant,
except for the friendly policeman who shows up every once in a while to check things out.
The whole scene, which anticipated so much of the technology we have today, but strangely
not email or texting, reflected the ethos of the time, a love of progress and a vision
of a future that stayed on course.
Appropriately, it was the first show ever shown on ABC television in colour, instead
of black and white.
It was neither utopian nor dystopian.
It was the best of life as we know it, projected far into the future.
People did not dress in uniforms or obey some dictator on a monitor in their homes.
The people in the show were as fashion-conscious as any American.
Their food was not embedded in pill form unless they wanted it that way, same now.
They had the equivalent of fast food delivery services in their homes.
The drive was always toward automation, more efficient ways of doing what needs to be done
The Message is a true one.
Human nature and the structure of reality itself doesn't change.
Only the gizmos we use change, and this is the most glorious thing that can happen in
the material world.
We can become poorer or we can become richer, but the fundamental facts of how the world
is built are immutable.
Things are scarce, but the possibilities for economic creation are infinite in a world
of trade, boundaries, law and private innovation.
Why is it so fun to watch?
Because it is a cartoon, because neat gadgets are everywhere, but mostly it amuses us because
everyone seems so strangely blasé about all the miracles that surround them.
They are living in postmodern houses that seem to be braced on some giant pole in the
the sky, and yet they think and act just like the rest of us who live on the ground.
They aren't surprised by anything, no matter how amazing.
And despite the extraordinary conveniences of life, the essential problems are the same
– the human vice is documented since the beginning of the written human language.
The kids have the same trouble as our kids.
Daughter Judy is spoiled and pouts too much.
His boy Elroy gets into trouble.
George tries in vain to solve all troubles but is mainly concerned about keeping his
job, and Jane, his wife, keeps the home together.
The persistence of choice leads to complaints that there isn't enough.
Pushing buttons is the main thing everyone complains about.
When they want to get away and relax, they usually choose some enterprise that offers
the experience of a made-up world of the past that seems to take them back to the Old West,
the Beta Bar Ranch.
But it is only pretend.
We have the equivalent with our fantasies of returning to nature by shopping at grocery
stores with philosophies, or believing that by not printing this email, we are saving
the planet.
In what other ways is our world like theirs?
We too are surrounded by amazing miracles generated by private enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Every day we wake up to some overnight development that makes our lives slightly better.
The advances have come along so quickly that articles on technology written just a few years
ago now strike us as old-fashioned.
Boy Elroy has a machine that can conjure up real-time worlds that allow him to play baseball
and tennis with his family members.
We call that the Wii.
The vacuum cleaners work without pushing them, and sure enough, we have those.
Just as the Jetsons' home was in the clouds, ever more of our life is ascending to the
The Digital World of Cloud Computing, where we meet with friends, do our work, spend leisure,
seek truth and inspiration.
Videophone is the great dream that this show dreamed up.
You had to pay.
When you call long distance, does anyone remember that?
Collect, does anyone remember that?
You had to accept or reject the charges.
The videophone was strapped to the ceiling and couldn't be moved, just like telephones
were until the day before yesterday.
Peter Seidor, a heavy hitter at the Mises Wiki, recently called my Skype app on my iPhone,
something I downloaded the other day just to test it out.
And I answered and voila, I'm video talking to a colleague in Germany.
I walk around with my phone.
The app was free.
Skype begs me to use the service.
The iPhone 4 came with FaceTime built in, not that the appearance of this miracle created
much chatter at all.
All this stuff is amazing!
It is astounding and beyond belief, more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons
could even imagine.
With this tiny box in my hand, I can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet
and pay nothing more than my usual service fee.
This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other
person on the globe.
The borders, the limits, the barriers, they are all being blasted away.
The pace of change is mind-boggling.
The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes every day.
Israel 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 correspondence.
Today, young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that's only for
now, and who knows what next year will bring.
Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that
makes all this possible, which is 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?
It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, which does not and will not
change so long as we live in a world of scarcity.
We adjust to amazing things and don't think much about the resource or the system that
produces them.
The Jetsons' world is our world.
Explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise
that is the very font of the good life.
But there is one major difference, and it isn't the flying car which we might have already
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 to its smallest detail.
The government is still Flintstones, an anachronism that operates as this massive drag on our
lives.
With its money manipulations, regulations, taxation, wars on people, products and services,
prisons and injustices, we similarly look the other way.
We try to find the workaround and keep living like the Jetsons.
Oftentimes things don't go right, and the reason is the anachronism that rules us.
And yet, unless we understand cause and effect in the way that the old liberal tradition
If you've explained it, we can miss the source.