Dakota Beacon

If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth four minutes and forty-eight seconds of your time. The video at the other end of this LINK is a stunning illustration of the power of wealth and freedom to do wonderful things--things such as prolonging life.

Hans Rosling is a Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Rosling boasts a "fact-based world view." After viewing the video, it would be easy to believe that the professor lives up to the boast.

Rosling presents a dazzling visual illustration of the effects of 200 years of economic progress on the state of humankind. Government policy that sets entrepreneurs free to do what entrepreneurs naturally do is the single biggest cause of human progress. Pay particular attention to how Rosling heavily emphasizes the necessity for people to be free to create the advances in technology and medicine made possible by the private use of wealth.

Notice that in countries like the African Congo, where totalitarian dictators still hoard wealth and rob the population of the freedom required to take advantage of wealth, people are still as poor and short-lived today as they were 200 years ago.

I have but one gripe with Professor Rosling's commentary. Near the end, he makes an offhand comment praising "green technology" as a life-extending tool. Too bad the Swede had to add this remark. This shows that even the most "fact-based" people can be taken in by fallacy-based claims.

Yet, as the professor says, his use of a 120,000-number database to create an animated illustration of the positive power of wealth and freedom is still "pretty neat, eh?"

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