Americans Should Realize How Good They've Got It

The wealth we enjoy today did not materialize by accident.

My pastor shared a story about Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, on a recent Sunday.

Pierce, an international relief worker and Baptist minister, founded the Christian relief organization after witnessing Marxist horrors in China and Korea. I knew of Pierce’s work rebuilding schools, hospitals, and churches in war-torn Asia, but nothing about a trip he took to Asia shortly before his 1978 death, though the story is somewhat famous.

While visiting a colleague in Indonesia, Pierce was on a walk when he encountered a girl on a bamboo mat by a river. She was dying. Pierce was upset that the child was not receiving care, but a translator told Pierce the girl enjoyed the coolness of the river. Yet she had a dying wish: to sleep. She was suffering from leukemia, and the illness was not just killing her, but disrupting the escape of sleep.

When Pierce was told this, he wept. Because he understood. He, too, was suffering from leukemia and was struggling to sleep. So he reached into his pocket and gave her several of his own sleeping pills so she could rest peacefully in her final days, fully knowing it was going to cause him nights of pain.

For days I thought about Pierce’s action, the problem of pain, and the mystery of compassion. I thought about my own small children and how I’d feel if one of them was suffering. It made me realize something: we are a very fortunate people.

The U.S. enjoys more wealth per person than almost any country in the world, yet few seem to realize it. I sometimes wish Americans could step back in time a century to see how things were not very long ago.

If you were born in 1915, your life expectancy was 54.5 years, the Bureau of Labor of Statistics points out. Nearly all babies were born at home, not hospitals, and one of 10 of them died before age one. The leading causes of death for adults were not heart disease or cancer, but pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis. The typical workweek was 55 hours, and that didn’t include your commute (which was likely a long walk). Your diet probably consisted of more lard than meat because it was cheap and one of the few sources of fat available to average people.

Wealthy people were better off, but not as much as you probably think. Even John D. Rockefeller, the Standard Oil tycoon and richest man then alive, lacked many of the luxuries we take for granted today. His infant daughter Alice died of dysentery because no amount of wealth could buy antibiotics.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, economist Adam Smith studied how nations became wealthy. He discovered that wealth was the result of free trade and the division of labor “which occasions, in a well-grounded society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”

Smith explained that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”

The 20th century proved him right. Centrally planned states became not just totalitarian but impoverished, whereas free countries became the most prosperous places on the planet. In recent decades, we’ve witnessed regions such as Vietnam and Hong Kong (and even China) become wealthy simply by allowing markets to operate instead of directing them with the heavy, clumsy hand of central planners.

Yet since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve seen support for capitalism decline. People imagine billionaires such as Jeff Bezos to be dragons hoarding wealth instead of entrepreneurs who’ve improved our lives in ways we can’t even fully understand. Those who preach the gospel of envy would have you believe there’s something wrong with an economic system that allows people to become as wealthy as Tesla CEO Elon Musk. There’s not.

The wealth we enjoy today did not materialize by accident. It was the result of capitalism, an economic system in which private individuals and organizations — not kings, presidents, bureaucracies, or political parties — own the means of production and the distribution of goods and products is determined by markets. The worst one can say of capitalist systems is that wealth inequality is part of the cost of the wealth we all enjoy.

There is more to life than our material world, of course. But peace, wealth, and comfort, the fruits of capitalism, are gifts that should not be taken for granted. But we often do. Many Americans today seem completely blind to the prosperity all around us. So this Thanksgiving, I’m encouraging everyone to see the wealth around us that we too often take for granted — including medicines that, even if they cannot heal us, can offer the mercy of a painless sleep.

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner.