I have said repeatedly to friends, though not yet on this blog, that the average American lives more comfortably than a king did a mere 150 years. Never in human history have so many people lived as well as the citizens of the United States of America. Hell, we are even told that one of the biggest "problems" facing poor people in the country is obesity! Imagine that. Poor people have access to too many calories for their own good.

Well, along comes Donald Boudreaux, chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, and he says the same thing.

Here's a small sample of the many ways in which ordinary Americans today are Bill-Gates-like rich compared to almost all humans who've ever lived:

None of us has ever starved to death

We have indoor plumbing and artificial light

We bathe regularly

We have solid roofs over our heads, rather than bug-and-vermin-infested thatched roofs

We routinely converse in real time to people one mile or one thousand miles away

We don't get smallpox

Our life expectancy is decades longer

Boudreaux goes on to explain the raison d'etre for all this wealth: Free Market Capitalism:

Markets are more fundamental than is technology to prosperity. For evidence, look no further than the fact that billions of people today remain desperately poor. People in Niger and North Korea are starving to death now, even though the technical knowledge for growing and distributing basic foodstuffs is readily available across the globe. Many Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans still carry their goods to and from market on wooden carts, despite the easy availability of automotive technology. Countless other people today dwell in earthen huts, have no indoor plumbing, die of malaria, and suffer all manner of other dangers and indignities that are easily avoided with commonplace technologies.

It is manifestly mistaken to suggest that technology is the reason for our prosperity. Clearly, our prosperity must rooted in something deeper than technology -- something that both promotes technological advance and, even more importantly, encourages the use of technological knowledge to make widely available the goods and services that we Americans today take for granted.

That something else is economic freedom which spawns complex markets.