The Achievement Economy
by Dr. Doug Cardell
Economics has a significant effect on your ability to be the best that you can be. Free-market capitalism is the only economic system ever devised that allows all individuals to develop fully. Most of the theory in self-psychology is based on the works of Maslow and McClelland. Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being and McClelland’s The Achieving Society, both published in 1961-2, underpin most of the studies of human needs and wants. They have a great deal in common. First, all organisms have biological requirements for life; in people, those include food, clothing, shelter, and so on. Second, people desire a safe environment with a certain amount of order and predictability that allows them to plan their lives successfully. Beyond these basic needs are less obvious needs. Maslow calls the first of these love and belonging; McClelland calls it affiliation. It is the need to be part of a group, to have a sense of being connected to a world outside of oneself. The next higher need Maslow calls esteem, and McClelland calls power. It is the need for self-worth, respect, and the ability to command that respect from others. Finally, there is the ultimate need. Maslow calls it self-actualization, and McClelland calls it achievement. By either name, it is the innate desire in people to be somebody. To have accomplishments, to have done important things. When we look back at our lives, it won’t be the fulfillment of our most basic needs that leaves us satisfied with our lives. While our affiliations may warm our hearts and remind us of how good we were to others, and the respect we draw from others may enhance our feelings of self-worth, these are not the most important. What will bring us the most satisfaction is what we have achieved. Those achievements will satisfy us in proportion to their difficulty for us. Being beautiful, handsome, tall, intelligent, or endowed with other advantageous traits is nothing to celebrate. Those are accidents of birth that are unearned. It is our achievements that will define our picture of ourselves. These achievements, this self-actualization, doesn’t need to be earth-shaking. Achievements can include getting that five-year sobriety token or graduating high school. If it was really hard for the individual and they overcame the difficulty and got it done, that’s an achievement for them. No matter how easily it might have been done by someone else. You may be wondering when we’re going to get to the part about economics. Here we go! Free-market capitalism is the only economic system ever devised, built on free people achieving and self-actualizing. Socialism and its close cousins, fascism and communism, are based on what we might call social-actualization. That is, subordinating self-actualization for the “good of the group” as determined by the government. This causes several problems. First, governments have an exceedingly poor record of deciding what’s best for groups and countries. That’s because groups and countries are made up of diverse individuals, and what’s good for some may be very bad for others. This is because every government action limits freedom for some. Sometimes, that’s OK. We want to limit the freedom of criminals to harm us. We want to limit the freedom of people under the influence from driving around killing people. We want to prevent four-year-olds from performing brain surgery. But many government regulations harm more people than they help. Furthermore, even experts disagree about what is right or best in almost every area of human endeavor. Anyone who reads a wide variety of news sources knows that every day, scientists are discovering new science that often contradicts existing science. Economists constantly disagree about where the economy is and where it’s headed. Historians and archaeologists regularly discover new sites that change our understanding of human development. Should the government listen to the experts who say coffee is bad for you or that you should drink more? Should the government ban coffee or require folks to drink it? Neither! Let the people decide for themselves. The best example I know of this kind of folly is outlined in my article, Death by Diet. Second, the socialists demand that human beings give up on self-fulfillment, that they set aside their highest, most sought-after human need. That’s one of the primary reasons socialism, fascism, and communism have consistently failed. You can’t get people to do things contrary to what’s hard-wired in their DNA. That’s why these centrally planned economies are all based on force. But, ultimately, even force always fails. People constantly seek achievement and self-actualization and will always resist any attempts to prevent them from doing so. On the other hand, free-market capitalism assumes that people are people and that their self-actualization can be ‘harnessed’ for the good of all. This is because people trying to succeed in free markets must try to create products and services that benefit others. They can only succeed by creating what they think other people want and trying to sell it in the free marketplace. Some will succeed, others will fail, but everyone is free to try. When they succeed, everybody wins because they get new things that benefit them. If they fail, that helps, too, because it tells other entrepreneurs to figure out what to try next. So, free-market capitalism empowers the individuals in the economy to achieve and self-actualize in a way that no other economic system has. A free economy is necessary for a free people. No other economic system allows individuals to pursue their own choices freely. Only free-market capitalism, as an economic system, allows this freedom.
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