^{Wealth & Poverty Review} Entrepreneurs Create Abundance. Bureaucrats Create Scarcity.

Mark Perry does a great chart that illustrates the relative changes in the nominal prices of a variety of products and services.

We used Mark’s chart to do time prices relative to average hourly wages and then calculated the change in abundance or scarcity. Note that our chart does not include TVs. TVs became 10,304 percent more abundant. If we had included TVs, they would have dwarfed all other items.

What is the difference between growing abundance and growing scarcity? In a word, government. When government enters a market, it typically influences supply and demand or both. If you increase demand through subsidies, you increase prices. If you restrict supply with occupational licensing and regulations, you increase prices. If you do both, like the items above in red, you really really increase prices.

Since 2000, TVs became 10,304 percent more abundant while hospital services became 38.6 percent less abundant. Imagine if the time prices of hospital services had dropped over 99 percent like TVs? What does this suggest? If we want more abundance and less scarcity, we really need more entrepreneurs and free markets and fewer bureaucrats and politicians.